Showing posts with label Mark Halperin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Halperin. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

57 states of Obama Nation feeling blues as TIME's Mark Halperin says "Obama's alienation of independents and white voters" may lead to GOP Congress

The 57 states of Obama Nation are already starting to feel the winter blues as TIME's Mark Halperin says that "Obama's alienation of independents and white voters" may lead to GOP Congress.

And clearly, some of those new GOP seats will definitely be coming in Florida, perhaps even Ron Klein's that hugs Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/07/allen_west_blacklisted_cystic_fibrosis_klein.php


Whatever they do, they can't make stiff and humorless
John Boehner the Speaker, and should instead select Hoosier Mike Pence like I've been saying all along, or Eric Cantor of Virginia.


TIME
One Nation
Dems Start to Panic As Midterm Reality Sets In

By Mark Halperin

Monday, Jul. 19, 2010


President Barack Obama during a meeting with house speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid on financial reform at the White House, April 14, 2010


Under pressure, the Democrats are cracking. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is a realization that Nancy Pelosi's hold on the speakership is in true jeopardy; that losing control of the Senate is not out of the question; and that time, once the Democrats' best friend, is now their mortal enemy. Since January, when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat, the President's party has tried to downplay in public what its pollsters have been saying in private: that Obama's alienation of independents and white voters, along with the enthusiasm gap between the right and the left, means that Republicans are on a trajectory to pick up massive numbers of House and Senate seats, perhaps even to regain control of Congress.


Read the rest of the article at: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2004646,00.html

------
Politics Daily
Nearly 6 in 10 Lack Confidence in Obama to Make Right Decisions
By Bruce Drake
July 13, 2010

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they have "just some" or no confidence in President Obama to make the right decisions for the country, and they give even lower marks to congressional Republicans and Democrats, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted July 7-11.

Read the rest of the story at:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/13/nearly-6-in-10-lack-confidence-in-obama-to-make-right-decisions/

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National Journal

RULES OF THE GAME
New Battle Lines Drawn Over Redistricting
Reformers Admit It's Still A Battle, But There's New Passion Behind Transparency Efforts
by Eliza Newlin Carney
Monday, July 19, 2010


The golden nugget of this article for my purposes is this:

In the House, the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition has backed legislation authored by Rep.
John Tanner, D-Tenn., that would pull back the curtain on the secretive redistricting process and force more public participation and input.

"The present system makes bipartisanship difficult and sometimes virtually impossible," said Tanner when the Blue Dogs endorsed his bill, the Redistricting Transparency Act, earlier this year. Tanner pointed to data from the Cook Political Report showing that fewer than 100 of 435 House districts are competitive within a 4-point margin of error.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/po_20100719_6570.php

See also: http://www.fairdistrictsflorida.org/home.php

I\
As most of you who come to this blog fairly regularly know by now, I'm a Blue Dog Democrat.
It's hardly a secret.

To go to a website full of compelling, fact-filled arguments against all the bad public policy prescriptions now flying around D.C. go to http://www.house.gov/melancon/BlueDogs/

The BDC advocates fiscal responsibility, with an emphasis on cost-saving and bipartisan common sense. Not surprisingly, given that approach, the only member from Florida is Allen Boyd from North Florida.

Thinking the way I do so publicly in Broward County means constantly running into people here who are extremely liberal and who have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid straight, with no chaser, and who for reasons of either birth, convenience or lack of perspective, have Broward or South Florida or The East Coast as the center of the universe, with no earthly conception of genuinely competitive congressional races.

Similarly, for them, the small-town life of inter-dependence depicted so tellingly in
NBC's fabulous Friday Night Lights might as well be set in Mars, as it's terra incognita for them.

It also means that, more often than not, these people have no conception of people like
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin or Baron Hill and what makes them or the blue-collar constituents they represent in Congress from South Dakota and Indiana, respectively, tick.

This is reflected in the fact that they actually think they are clever by calling someone like me or others names, simply because we have a different opinion about how one goes about actually solving genuine problems, with the
Broward NewTimes and Sun-Sentinel Broward Politics blog comment forums being their preferred sites, though they know not the first thing about me, or, judging by what they write, this country.

It's all rather pathetic and self-serving to a fair-thee-well, of course, but then look at who does it and consider as well who the South Florida news media regularly shows as the Broward County man with the real power in the Democratic Party,
lobbyist Mitch Caesar.
Now there's a role model!

He's a person who despite all his lip service about community, somehow never saw fit to make it his business to speak before the Broward Ethics Commission to share his thoughts on what was going on in this corrupt county amongst his friends, even while folks like myself and Charlotte Greenbarg were both speaking on the record and writing about it.
But not him.

And as you know from previous posts here, his bosom pals like Broward Comm. Stacy Ritter chose to use their visits there as a chance to rip people they disagree with rather than to distinguish themself.

http://www.redstate.com/etcartman/2010/04/07/lt-col-allen-west-responds-to-democrat-lies-and-accusations/

http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2010/01/monday_quick_takes.php-

http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/search/index/collection:all/keywords:stacy+ritter/sort:dateDesc/


Mitch Caesar's bluster, even at supermarkets reportedly, makes him personally toxic and a member in good standing of Broward's endemic culture of corruption.

You never heard Caesar ask publicly why Steve Geller waited so long to ACTUALLY move into the Broward County Commission District that he's been running for, in order to meet the residency requirements, did you? Nope.
So even while Geller's over on A1A in Hollywood Beach, his wife and kids still live back in Cooper City? Yes.

To me, Caesar is the personification of what scares much-needed high-tech companies and jobs from coming to Broward, since
companies that can actually choose where to locate don't want to have to pay-to-play -and they don't.

Closer to home, i
f you run around in the same bi-polar circles -round and round and round- like the human defamer West Hollywood Dissident or the the one-man hit squad that blogger extraordinaire Chaz Stevens has quite accurately dubbed Hallandale Beach's own little Unabomber, manifesto writer and Political Commissar, Andrew Markoff, well, need I say more?
The political proof is in the pudding -as well as all around you in Broward County.


See also:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/
http://www.politico.com/
http://www.politicsdaily.com/

Thursday, January 14, 2010

re 1/11/10 Ben Smith in POLITICO: Game over: The Clintons stand alone; Haiti

I've held off on posting this for a few days since
there was so much discussion of the contents
and short-term implications of Game Change
by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
over this past weekend on the network chat
shows, I didn't want to add this to the pile
when you couldn't properly appreciate it.

I personally know that at least a handful of you
have actually started reading it, but Ben Smith's
overview below is the best I've seen so far
because he sees past the individual anecdotes
towards the larger un-mentioned
story,
the fall of the House of Clinton.

After you've read it, I think you'll agree.


Last year I was running Ben's POLITICO
widget on my blog, along with their 44 widget
for Obama stories, so people could easily
access his entertaining and informative pieces,
but I seemed to run into
constant technical
problems with those widgets, so I reluctantly
pulled them down.


Thursday 2:00 p.m.
By the way, it's just my opinion, but 46 hours
after the earthquake in Haiti, I find it completely
unbelievable that the the U.S. military and our
erstwhile Allies in the region seem NOT to have
established a working unit to coordinate logistics
and air traffic control at the Port-au-Prince
airport, the way we quickly did at the Baghdad
airport
after our invasion, which I supported.

I know the latter had many months of planning
overall, but on the other hand, I think it's fair
to remind you that this time, we know that
nobody will be shooting at us, right?


Sufficient number of trucks to move planes
stuck on the airport out of the way and placed
on the perimeter so they don't pose a safety
hazard, gas re-supply trucks to handle refueling,
mobile air traffic control units, modules,
helicopter techs, etc.


While I haven't seen these stories myself,

I have already heard from friends who know
about these things that UPS and FedEx
would like to use some of their planes to bring
supplies, starting initially from their hubs of
Memphis and Louisville down there,
and
then return quickly, perhaps to Miami
and Hollywood-Ft. Lauderdale to keep
shuttling back-and-forth, and maybe
even deploy some of their logistics
professionals
down there.

Why?

So we DON'T see the absurd sight of
:
a.) people passing supplies hand-to-hand
instead of using conveyor belts or fork lifts, or

b.) well-meaning charity groups dropping boxes
of supplies into huge crowds of desperate people,
with the entirely predictable chaos.


But UNTIL the airport is completely cleared
and secured, they can't, and therefore nothing
of significance is going to happen.


At 2:10 p.m., I've yet to see a shot of the airport
under control.

Popular South Florida blogger and activist
Chaz
Stevens from Deerfield Beach, a veritable
one-man
tidal wave of information and enthusiasm
and a sharp-eyed watchdog
for public transparency
and accountability from
state and local government
at his blog, Acts of Sedition
,
http://www.actsofsedition.com/ wrote
in earlier that I may be wrong.


Actually, you are wrong I believe. Two Coast
Guard Cutters (one by the name of Forward)
are off the coast of Haiti providing air traffic control.


Chaz
is no doubt right, but I was referring to the
airport
itself, per se, though perhaps I was not so
clear when I
sent this out as an email a few minutes
ago.


My sense of things is that some of the reporters
there are going out of their way not to criticize
the chaotic recovery efforts thus far, but once
that dam has been breached, it won't stop.


Then it's Obama's tar-baby, whether that's
fair or not.

With the MLK holiday on Monday and even
more Americans home watching the awful scenes
unfold before them on TV, right before his
State of the Union speech, our response
to this tragedy, such as it is, will be firmly
placed around his neck.
Just saying...


-----

POLITICO
Game over: The Clintons stand alone
By: Ben Smith
January 11, 2010 06:05 PM EST


A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast and furious counterattack from the Clinton inner circle.


What’s notable about the highly publicized release of “Game Change,” however, is the virtual silence from the Clinton camp. The lack of public outrage seems to mark the sputtering end of what was once known as the Clinton political machine and underlines a fact that onetime Clinton loyalists acknowledge: The book’s primary sources about the former candidate and current secretary of state are her own former staffers and intimates.

Read the rest of the story at:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31345.html#ixzz0cQXHlJSP

---------

See also:
The Atlantic Online
Marc Ambinder's excellent blog, which I get everyday
"The Juiciest Revelations In "Game Change"
January 8 2010
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/01/the_juiciest_revelations_in_game_change.php



Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW 'Game Change' by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
The political journalists provide juicy insider tidbits about the 2008 presidential candidates, their spouses and other players, but it's hard to see the enlightenment behind the entertainment
By Tim Rutten
January 13, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-rutten13-2010jan13,0,4331192.story


An excerpt of the book that ran in
New York magazine
last Saturday


Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster

A candidate whose aides were prepared to block him from becoming president. A wife whose virtuous image was a mirage. A mistress with a video camera. In an excerpt from the new book Game Change—their sweeping account of the 2008 campaign—the authors reveal that, inside the Edwards triangle, nothing was too crazy to be true.

Read the excerpt at:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/63045/