NQ First Responders: Dem donations drop; Netanyahu’s moment; Steyn on anti-BO racism; Greenwald reads between the lines; and dogfighting daycare
By LisaB on September 25, 2009 at 9:30 PM in Current Affairs
1) Today’s WaPo reports that Democratic political committees are having trouble with fundraising. Wonder why?
The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP’s long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees’ receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.
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As the battle over President Obama’s effort to overhaul the health-care system reached a fever pitch this summer, the three national Republican committees combined to bring in $1.7 million more than their Democratic counterparts in August. The pair of Democratic committees tasked with raising money for House and Senate candidates — and doing so at a time when the party holds its strongest position on Capitol Hill in a generation — have watched their receipts plummet by a combined 20 percent with little more than a year to go before the November 2010 midterm elections.
Some Democrats say complacency is the problem, according to WaPo. Others say it’s the administration’s rhetoric toward rich people and firms causing the drop.
Some Democrats characterized the fundraising bonanza they experienced during the 2008 election cycle as an anomaly, saying Obama’s campaign — which shattered records by raising more than $700 million — brought so many new donors to the party fold that some contributors have understandably drifted away without the charismatic candidate at the top of the ticket in 2010. They also said a busy fall fundraising season for the president and vice president began in earnest last week with Obama’s trip to Philadelphia, which raised $2.5 million split between Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and the DSCC, and Biden’s fundraising work for House members.
I say, “follow the money.” If a politician is an effective “rainmaker,” lots of people and lots of money continue to pile on. Couldn’t this drop in donations reflect BO’s drop in the polls?
2) PM Netanyahu caused a sensation with his “have you no shame” speech. You may have seen the clip already. The NYP has the transcript.
Here’s the WSJ clip:
Whatever you may think about his speech, it was certainly more impassioned than BO’s.
3) Mark Steyn weighs in on the opposition-to-BO = racism equation. During the campaign, Steyn talked to many voters about whom they hoped would win. Steyn would say he hoped McCain would win (although he was a reluctant supporter).
And at that point the worldly liberal Democrat who had sought my views would nod thoughtfully and agree: yes, McCain would win. Not because of Sarah Palin. But because Americans were too racist to stomach the thought of a black man in the White House.
I never reckoned much to this argument. If you spent 20 minutes on the campaign trail almost anywhere, it seemed clear that many voters felt the first 43 chief executives did not reflect the rich tapestry of the American community and were panting to cross “Vote for a black president” off their to-do list. On the morning of Nov. 5, I thought about all those Democrats so convinced of their fellow Americans’ ingrained racism. As my comrade Victor Davis Hanson put it, we conservatives were wrong about the election results, but those liberals were wrong about their country. Which you would think might prove chastening.But apparently not. We are now eight months into the 44th presidency. The Obamessiah has come down to earth. He’s now just another 50/50 president, his approval ratings having fallen further faster (according to some polls) than any occupant of the Oval Office since Truman. The obvious explanation for this would seem to be his ambitious, expensive, transformative and radical agenda: the governmentalization of health care, cap-and-trade environmental legislation, the federal takeover of the automobile industry, the gazillion-dollar flopperoo of the non-stimulating “stimulus,” more debt, more deficits, more taxes, more regulation, more government, everywhere you turn. This would be a tough sell for even the smoothest pitchman.
But sometimes the obvious explanation is too obvious. Those “tea party” protests? “This is about hating a black man in the White House,” explained the eminent thinker Janeane Garofalo. “The only thing missing is a noose,” huffed L.A. Weekly about a poster showing Obama as the Joker. It turned out to be the work of a left-wing Palestinian from Chicago, but why get hung up on details? If you oppose the massive expansion of government and multi-trillion-dollar expenditures, you’re a racist.
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I suppose it’s possible that opposition to the federal government’s annexation of one-sixth of the U.S. economy is being driven by nostalgia for segregated lunch counters. And no doubt, if you write for the New York Times or teach race and gender studies at American colleges for long enough, it seems entirely reasonable, listening to a patient profess satisfaction with her present health insurance arrangements, to respond, “You know, if you re-sewed the back of that hospital gown so your ass wasn’t showing, your Klan sheet would be as good as new.”
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After being interviewed on TV about my own antipathy to the Democrats’ reforms, I received an email from a (white) lady in New York who said that, if only I were to agree to a course of treatment, I’d soon realize that my opposition to Obamacare stemmed from submerged racial paranoia rooted in “fear of the Other.” Actually, I’ve been opposed to government health care my entire adult life, and wherever I’ve been on the receiving end of it: in Canada, medicare was introduced by a bunch of pasty white guys; in Britain, by a bunch of pasty white blokes; in Bulgaria (where I had the misfortune to be treated for a torn ligament), by a bunch of Commie monobrowed Slavs. Okay, that last one is racist. But you get my point: no black males were involved in my deep-seated racial paranoia about government health care.
———–The surest sign you’re suffering from “fear of the Other” is the reflexive urge to attribute it to anyone who disagrees with you: indeed, the people who most seem to fear “the Other” are those ever more fevered in their insistence that opposition to Democrat policies is nothing to do with the policies. The tea party protesters are not merely “racists” and “Nazis” but also “teabaggers,” a designation applied to them by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the voice of the people and Gloria Vanderbilt’s son. “Teabagging” is apparently a sexual term for dunking the scrotum hither and yon as if it were a sachet of Lapsang Souchong. Not being as expert in this field of study as CNN anchormen, I am unclear as to whether the teabagger is the chap dangling the scrotal sac or the lucky recipient. But, in considering the ease with which its political application spread through the media, one is struck by the strangely fierce need of Mr. Cooper and his fellow journalists not merely to report on the protesters but to sneer at them.
Very entertaining. Do go read the entire piece.
4) Abe Greenwald at Commentary has a brief, but interesting take on some of BO’s UN remarks.
Barack Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly was much more than some feel-good, can’t-we-all-get-along pep rally for the multi-culti set. It was a straightforward explication of a worldview that seeks to redefine international relations along frighteningly utopian lines. It is a glimpse into the ideological stew that has produced the dangerous real-world policies toward our one-time allies that we now see unfolding everywhere, from Israel to Poland and the Czech Republic to Honduras.
Greenwald quotes BO and then gives his interpretation:
“No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” There is no exceptionalism, American or otherwise. And no nations are to play favorites. That means, among other things, the U.S. will not extend special privileges to democracies or other free societies.
Worth a look. It’s a brief article.
5) Lastly, looking for high quality daycare? Think daycare and dogfighting don’t go together? Well, for someone it’s a natural combination. Check out the Chicago Tribune.
A Maywood house in which a child day-care facility was operating also was the base of a dogfighting ring, officials said Wednesday.
Cook County sheriff’s police arrested three people and recovered nine dogs from three homes as part of a raid Tuesday, authorities said. Officers found one dog with its eye ripped out, another with a leg twisted backward and yet another with its lower extremities nearly ripped off its body, Sheriff Tom Dart said. Other dogs had various other injuries that required medical treatment.
Dart said a swing set on which the children played was 10 feet from a garage where “a vicious fighting dog” was kept. The garage had bloodstained floors, Dart said.
Dogs bred to fight are often very vicious and children should never be around them. Of course, dogs shouldn’t be bred to fight in the first place. Overall, I’d say these people show a wanton disregard for everything and everyone but themselves. Those weaker than themselves, whether animals or children, are not to be guarded and cared for but to be exploited.
Child endangerment + animal abuse = quality daycare?????
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