(Politico) Democrats have seized on Republicans as the party of unlimited secret money.

The only problem: so are Democrats.

In recent days, Obama released an ad blasting “secretive oil billionaires” for attacks on him, Nancy Pelosi unveiled a campaign slogan calling for “a new politics free of special interest influence,” and the Democratic National Committee released a web ad accusing Mitt Romney of lying about his ties to a super PAC that’s spent millions supporting him.

Maybe that would have sounded better in 2008, when Obama put the kibosh on the Democratic outside money infrastructure — or even in 2010, when Obama led a chorus of Democrats assailing Republicans’ outside spending.

But this year, Democrats are playing the same game. Obama’s team has blessed a network of super PACs trying to raise the same seven-figure checks as Romney’s. And Obama’s allies have gone even further than Romney’s, setting up non-profit groups that do not disclose their donors at all.

There does actually come a point when money in politics has gone too far. Instead of providing a sound policy for America to get elected, politicians attempt to “buy” an election, and one need not look any further than ….. Barack Obama! Team Obama wants to raise $1 billion for his re-election. He refused to take public money for the 2008 election, instead relying on his big donor base of really rich people, along with some folks giving $3. And, now, after complaining about Super PACs and secret money, Obama and the Democrats are doing exactly the same.

But party leaders suggest the secret money attacks forecast in Obama’s ad – his first of the cycle – are part of a broader messaging strategy that seeks to cast Republicans as secretive and unethical pawns of big business who couldn’t care less about the plight of regular Americans.

“The reason that it was something we led with was that it’s part of the contrast,” said DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz when asked about why Obama’s ad began with a secret money attack rather than the gauzy positive themes that typically define inaugural ads.

What else can Obama do? His 1st term has been a mess. He has a few wins, mostly in the arena of being a warmonger, which should make his base truly happy, eh? His domestic policies have been a disaster, taking a recession and extending it, as well as making it worse. He wasted almost a trillion dollars on his pork laden Stimulus. He and the Dems wasted a year on their extraordinarily unpopular ObamaCare. Rather interesting that he really doesn’t want to talk about them now. There are more people on food stamps than ever before. People are abandoning the workforce in record numbers. The price of gasoline has stagnated in the mid-to-upper $3 range, causing the price of real goods to rise. His idiotic investments in “clean energy” have actually turned the industry into a joke. And so forth and so on.

And Obama has no new ideas to solve the problems. Just an escalating whine about income inequality and people doing their fair share, which means giving the Central Government more money to waste on pet projects for campaign donors in order to get more campaign cash to get re-elected. So, Obama will whine about “secretive” money while taking the same. Will he take money from Mickey Mouse, Dela Ware, and Anonymous this cycle? Will he abandon the use of credit card donation filters as he did last cycle? And will his whines make a difference, since they failed miserably during the 2010 midterms?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Huffington Post) Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was pressed again Tuesday on one of the ghosts of his political past, when a notorious advertisement on climate change featuring him alongside then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was brought up on the campaign trail.

“The dumbest thing I’ve done in the last four years was sit on a couch with Nancy Pelosi,” Gingrich said, according to The Hill’s Mike O’Brien. “I can’t defend it.”

In the ad, Gingrich and Pelosi share a seat on a sofa in front of the Capitol and declare that “the country must take action to address climate change.”

While Newt is (supposedly) against any sort of federal cap and trade system, he has yet to say, like Romney has, that he would nix any “climate change” legislation and regulations as president. Some people may not care too much about this, but, to my mind, the entire issue of “climate change” is about putting even more power and forcibly taken taxpayer money in the hands of government elites, giving them more control over our lives and the economy. None of the plans actually solve what the Warmists say is killing the Earth, merely supposedly slowing it.

This is a question Newt needs to answer.

(ABC News) House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi now says she is not sitting on a trove of opposition research on former House Speaker-turned-GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

In an interview conducted Friday and published Monday, Pelosi hinted that once the time is right she has some juicy stories to tell about her former colleague.

“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told Talking Points Memo. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him. Four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

But this afternoon, Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, suggested that her comments have been misconstrued beyond the leader’s intent.

“Leader Pelosi was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware,” Hammill wrote in a statement.

Someone probably told her that it would be against the House rules to release information from Ethic committee hearings in such a manner.

“I regard it as a useful education of the American people to see what a tainted unethical political operation Nancy Pelosi was engaged in,” Gingrich said. “And I would hope the House would immediately condemn her if she uses any material that was gathered while she was on the ethics committee because it would be a total violation of the committee.”

This is what Democrats are about. They can rarely win on ideas, so, they have to win on smears. Not that I am a super big fan of Newt by any means, but, I’ll put his ideas over those of Democrats any day and twice on Sunday.

◼ THEN: On Health Care protestors, Pelosi Chokes Up Warning Against Political “Violence” – Real Clear Politics, SEPT 17, 2009

When the Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Pelosi called them “astroturf” and “un-American” people who were “carrying swastikas.”

◼ AND NOW: Pelosi on Occupy Wall Street Protesters: “God bless them” – Weekly Standard, OCT 6, 2011

(Fox News) Three weeks into a growing protest movement targeting Wall Street and the nation’s financial services sector, President Obama expressed empathy Thursday for the demonstrators, even going so far as to elevate them as a force in the 2012 election cycle.

“I think part of people’s frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of [lending] practices that should not have been allowed weren’t necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact,” the president said at a midday news conference Thursday.

The protestors, he added, “are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works…and that’s going to express itself politically in 2012 and beyond.”

(The Politico) House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday praised the thousands of “Occupy Wall Street” protesters crowding New York City and other cities across the nation.

“God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”

We all know this will eventually turn violent in some manner then spread. NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has already stated the protesters will be met with force if they target police officers. Truthout is agitating for the class warfare method. The NYPD officer who was forced to use pepper spray on the protesters has received death threats. Then there’s this

Several influential New York state lawmakers have received threatening mails saying it is “time to kill the wealthy” if they don’t renew the state’s tax surcharge on millionaires, according to reports.

“It’s time to tax the millionaires!” reads the email, according to WTEN in Albany. “If you don’t, I’m going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League [expletive] I can find.”

Anyone remember hearing about it on the news? I first heard about it on the KC and Carmen show on Rush Radio 680 here in Raleigh. Imagine had this come from a TEA Party member, it’d be everywhere. Instead, you can barely find the story (link via Fire Andrea Mitchell, which also provides a story about cannibalistic OWS protesters).

Occupy Wall Street has also been joined by the fart smelling movement. Insert your own DERP face here.

Look, it’s not just what Obama and Pelosi said yesterday, this is something that goes back years. Nor can we solely blame Obama and Pelosi when this turns violent: you can also blame a good chunk of the elected Democrats, their big talking heads, and folks like the Big Unions leaders. They’ve been using this class warfare meme, whipping their little minions/sheeple up into a frenzy, telling them they are entitled, that Wall Street and big companies are evil (there always has to be some bad guy in the Democrat playbook. Really hopey changey, eh?), that they aren’t rich because some Other Guy/Gal stole their money.

This was the thought I had a few days ago, that Democrats will be to blame when the violence comes, as I was chatting on a forum. We know it will. And we also know who will get hurt quickly, which will be small business owners, those same Main Street folks the protesters say they are in solidarity with. Their stores will be looted and destroyed as soon as the violence starts, like we saw in Europe. And here in America. A good example would be the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.

How will it start? Unsure. Possible due to an altercation between one of the dirty, smelly liberals and a shop owner who doesn’t want them coming in to his/her store, stinking it up, using the restroom, then purchasing nothing. Or, perhaps between a city official and the protesters, as the official tells them to clean their messes up. But, it will happen if this movement continues and spreads. Of that, we can be sure.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Please sign the drill now petition.

The House stunned Republican leaders Wednesday by rejecting a temporary spending bill that would have funded the government through Nov. 18.

The vote failed, 195-230, after Democrats pulled their support for the bill and Republican leaders were forced to scramble for enough votes entirely within their own ranks. Four dozen conservatives voted against the bill because it left spending levels for 2012 higher than the cap set in the House GOP budget.

The defeat hands leverage to congressional Democrats in a dispute over federal disaster funding. Democratic leaders objected to a GOP provision cutting funding from a Department of Energy manufacturing loan program to offset additional money for disaster relief.

The House was already on a collision course with the Senate over the level of funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The House bill included $3.65 billion for FEMA, with about $1 billion of that money offset by a cut to an energy program supporting loans for the production of fuel-efficient cars. The Senate had already approved $6.9 billion in disaster relief, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had vowed to try to amend the House bill to match that level.

That’s right, Democrats objected to $1 billion in cuts for fuel efficient cars. They say it creates all sorts of private sector jobs through subsidies to car manufacturers. And, it probably does at least save some. But, why is the government propping up private companies in the first place? Especially car companies, which should be able to afford developing advanced technology themselves.

“I have serious objections to the pay-for in this legislation,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. “I have a bigger objection that we would have to pay for disasters. We never paid for the tax cuts for the rich, they never were paid for. We never paid for the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, they were never paid for.”

And the cat’s out of the bag: Nancy Pelosi goes full liberal and exposes that she is against the Afghanistan war, after we were, you know, attacked by Islamic terrorists. Oh, and then there’s this

Republicans also disputed the Democratic opposition to offsetting disaster aid, saying it had been done several times previously, including when Pelosi was Speaker of the House.

So, she’s done it before. But, the GOP now has the House, so, she must demagogue.

Anyhow, there is apparently $4 billion left in a fund for giving subsidies to car manufacturers. But, a $1 billion cut? Obviously that means the world is ending. What cuts would the Democrats approve of if they vote against a bill over $1 billion?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

The White House announced late Friday that President Obama will meet with the Dalai Lama at the White House on Saturday, finally putting an end to mounting speculation about whether the Tibetan religious leader would get an invite to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“This meeting underscores the President’s strong support for the preservation of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity and the protection of human rights for Tibetans,” the White House said in a statement. “The President will highlight his enduring support for dialogue between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and the Chinese government to resolve differences.”

The timing of the weekend meeting suggests the administration’s determination to attach as little pomp and publicity to the visit as possible. Until Friday, the White House had kept silent about a possible meeting after the exiled leader arrived in Washington on July 6; Saturday marks the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s last day in the nation’s capital.

So, Obama’s kinda working the Dalai Lama into the schedule for the hell of it? The publication time of the Politico story is 8pm on Friday. There was nothing showing on the Presidents official schedule and guidance for Saturday when I looked Friday morning.

Obama’s meeting with the Tibetan leader in February 2010 drew criticism from some members of Congress and human rights organizations when a photo surfaced of the Dalai Lama exiting from a side door of the White House and walking past a pile of snow and trash bags on the ground.

During the exiled leader’s visit to Washington in October 2009, Obama was criticized for becoming the first U.S. president since 1991 to not invite the Dalai Lama to the White House.

The meeting is closed to the press. Most transparent administration ever!

Remember, though, that a few days back Obama had planned on inviting Congress members to Camp David to discuss the debt and budget, and both Boehner and Pelosi said “don’t bother.” Probably because they knew that Obama would spend most of the day goofing off (is there a golf course at Camp David? Nope, just a driving range). So, Obama’s schedule was clear for Saturday as of the 14th. Which means that the meet and greet with the Dalai Lama is a last minute deal. But, then, Obama has a habit of treating world leaders shabbily.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

After months of relatively robust job growth, President Barack Obama and his team must now reckon with the reality that the economy probably won’t be on firm ground during the 2012 campaign — and that he must temper some of the Morning-in-America optimism he’d hoped to run on.

Contrary to belief, outward optimism from POTUS is actually a good thing, whether the person is a Democrat or Republican. And optimistic outlook can help increase the optimism of the general public. Of course, there comes a point when the people can see that the optimism is complete cow patties in the face of serious issues. Obama reached the point of “dude, you’re living in a fantasy world” well over a year ago.

The president has been unable to curb the nation’s nine percent unemployment rate, so he will be forced to put the best possible face on a sputtering recovery.

He’s been unable to do that because he has the wrong policies in place, and overreaches with others. Consider, what if the Stimulus had been aimed primarily at the private sector, and at stimulating existing sectors, instead of trying to invent new green tech and weatherize the same homes people were being kicked out of? What if he had said “I want the 2001/2003 tax cuts reauthorized for 6 years”, which would have brought certainty in the tax realm? What if he had kept Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to simple legislation that would have been aimed solely at those without health insurance, and wanted it (which was the original point, until Reid and Pelosi went to the extreme)? This is why Biden was so correct in that the White House doesn’t lend itself to on the job training.

Democratic strategists say that means adopting an ungainly three-pronged political approach: Talking up economic gains since the darkest days of 2008 and 2009, highlighting a modest job-creation agenda blocked by Republicans and making the case that things would be far worse if the GOP were in charge.

In other words, lie and blame Republicans. We all know that Blame Bush will make an appearance. Hopefully, the GOP contenders, and whoever the final nominee is, will blast Obama with the truth that he held large majorities in the Senate and House, and could have forced through legislation.

Politico points out that he gave this meme a whirl on Friday on a jaunt to Toledo, Ohio, and

“Even though the economy is growing, even though it has created more than 2 million jobs over the past 15 months, we still face some tough times, we still face some challenges,” Obama said Friday during a visit to a Chrysler plant.

“This economy took a big hit. It is just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it’s going to take a while for you to mend. That’s what happened to our economy,” the president said. “It’s taking a while to mend.”

He also ticked off a list of “headwinds” beyond his control: Japan’s crisis, instability in the Mideast and rising gas prices.

See? Anything good is Thanks To Obama, anything bad is Someone/thing Else’s Fault. Gotta love a president who acts more like the kid from Family Circus, who blames things on Not Me. Remember, though, all his early legislation was designed to kick start the economy immediately, not to take years. Compare to Reagan, who had similar conditions, and put in place wise policies that got things going. Bush came in with a slow economy, then was hit with the affects of 9/11, and put in place wise policies. Obama’s stumbling around in the dark without a flashlight.

Anyhow, over at MSNBC, we get

President Barack Obama cannot escape one giant vulnerability as he bids to keep his job: There are millions of voters who still don’t have one.

Suddenly, the snapshot of the American economy is depressing again.

Job creation is down. So is consumer confidence. And homes sales, auto sales, construction spending, manufacturing expansion.

The brutal month of May was a reminder of the economy’s fragility and the risks for an incumbent president.

Liberal supporters in the media and punditry are starting to realize that Obama is in a wee bit of trouble in Reality Land.

(No idea who did the image, found it at Red State while looking to make one myself)

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Politico has a sad tale to tell about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (I just love that: former. Say it with me, FORMER House Speaker). The once powerful California Representative held a big one-year celebration of Obamacare to show off her keystone legislative victory and like the kid nobody likes, her invites to the party were ignored by all the top Democrats. Not just some of them, ALL of them!

This is a far cry from the power she wielded only months ago. Back in the old days when Pelosi sent out an invite to a press availability, like she did this week with her Obamacare celebration, the entire leadership would dutifully drop anything they were doing and they’d show up to Pelosi’s little show and they’d do it with bells on.

These days, not so much.

As Politico notes, Pelosi’s pressers are being ignored by the rest of the Democratic leadership.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s not hiding under her desk— she held another press conference Thursday morning to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the health care law next week.

The only thing missing was the rest of the heavy hitters.

…But neither of the pressers, so far, has featured the all-stars. It’s not just a contrast with last year — it’s also a contrast with Republicans, who have been happy to gather their most vocal critics of the law to blast away at one press conference after another.

How far the mighty have fallen, eh?

Naturally the Democrats are all waving this off as meaningless. But all their scoffing and all the attempts to obfuscate the truth cannot hide the fact that Pelosi is obviously no longer considered a leader by the Democrat Party. If Pelosi cannot command the presence of even one other Democrat Party leader and is forced to surround herself with backbenchers and no-names, then it is painfully obvious that the leadership see no reason to jump when she rings her bell.

I will refrain from saying that this is the fastest fall from power in the history of the House — that would likely be hyperbole — but there is no doubt that her power has evaporated and her stock has dropped faster than a 1929 stock broker.

The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

After about a month in control of the House of Representatives, Republicans haven’t managed to undo as many deeds of their Democratic predecessors as they’d like. They couldn’t get rid of “Obamacare,” and they haven’t made much headway in slashing the president’s $4-trillion budget. But the GOP has succeeded in short order in one critically important venture: getting rid of the “compostable” cornstarch-based knives, forks and spoons that were a universally — and bipartisanly — hated feature of the House cafeteria operation.

The tableware, the color of mucus and as bendable as a pocket watch in a Salvador Dali painting (and thus unable to pierce any foodstuff firmer than the innards of Brie cheese), was the most visible manifestation of recently deposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Green the Capitol initiative. That was her carbon-cutting effort to use the food-service and other House operations to fight global warming and a host of other perceived environmental, health and social ills. During the lunchtime rush, you could observe dozens of staffers struggling to stab lettuce leaves and poultry pieces with fork tines that appeared to be double-jointed as well as dull.

But, how “green” were these compostable cornstarch-based cutlery?

It turns out that the composting program not only cost the House an estimated $475,000 a year (according to the House inspector general) but actually increased energy consumption in the form of “additional energy for the pulping process and the increased hauling distance to the composting facility,” according to a news release from Lungren.

As far as carbon emissions were concerned, Lungren concluded that the reduction was the “nominal … equivalent to removing one car from the road each year.” He plans to switch the House to an alternate waste-management system recommended by the Architect of the Capitol, in which dining-service trash would be incinerated and the heat energy captured.

So, instead of the typical symbolic Do Something approach Pelosi took, that not only barely worked, but annoyed the people it affected and reduced their quality of a dining experience, Dan Lungren, the GOP congressman from the Sacramento area who now heads the House Administration Committee, is instituting a reality based solution that will turn the implements into actual energy.

This is why the climate morons are so dangerous: they live in a world that bears little resemblance to reality, and their solutions often create other, and sometimes bigger, problems. If they had decided to slowly push real world solutions that actually work, and without all the climate alarmism, we might have had quite a bit more, and cheaper, alternative energy by this time, along with an upgraded electrical grid. But, no, they had to act loony tunes, which turns people off, and makes what should have been Very Good Ideas into perceived wacko ideas. Thanks, morons!