Emily’s List goes after Sarah Palin in the name of . . . women

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From USA Today:

Emily’s List, a fundraising group that has raised and spent more than $43 million to elect Democratic women to office, is taking on Sarah Palin.

Leaders of Emily’s List are holding a press conference in Washington tomorrow to unveil a campaign targeting Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and the candidates she has endorsed.

The group says it wants to counter Palin’s appeal to women: “Sarah Palin has predicted a rising tide of mothers and women voters will support her so-called ‘Mama Grizzly’ candidates,” says a just-issued Emily’s List press release.

“We call upon women — and men! — to let their voices be heard and to reject Palin’s reactionary candidates and backward-looking agenda.”

(Cuz we all know that feminism is only for the right kind of women.)

I dunno. I was raised by a feminist single-mother who was (and still is) pretty conservative on most issues. Maybe that’s why I like and admire Sarah Palin while disagreeing with her on almost everything.

I think Emily’s list is making a mistake. Feminist groups should be pushing candidates like Hillary Clinton, not bashing other women they don’t agree with. The circular firing squad hurts all women.

But what do I know, I’m just a guy.

YMMV

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MANDATORY DISCLAIMER:

The Confluence is a liberal blog and does not support Sarah Palin blah blah blah.

She is a conservative pro-life Republican yadda yadda yadda – do I really need to keep explaining this shit?

Here at The Confluence we don’t drink any flavor of Kool-aid.

In Color

Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders. Pie Town, New Mexico, October 1940

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Thanks to our regular commenter “Dee” we were alerted to a series of photos in the Denver Post titled “Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943.” The picture above could easily be my grandparents, George and Laura Burdett of Ness County, Kansas. The picture below could be my mother and her siblings.

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Children asleep on bed during square dance. McIntosh County, Oklahoma, 1939 or 1940.

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A picture is worth a thousand words so go quit reading this and go look at them. Go on, git!

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It takes a special kind of Democrat…

It takes a special kind of Democrat to turn a Nobel Peace Prize into a Shrimp Taco freebie.

A couple weeks ago, Obama’s approval dropped to 41% in the USA Today/Gallup poll. Here was my quick breakdown on the polls findings:

Obama’s approval drops to 41%.

53% disapprove. (Got that number from RCP and doublechecked at pollster.com, since it wasn’t in the article)

His support on Afghanistan is down to 36% (it was 48% in February.)

More Americans support his handling of the economy than the war, and only 39% of Americans support his handling of the economy.

A record 43% says it was a mistake to go into Afghanistan after 9/11.

Also a record number disapprove of his handling of Iraq, though the article doesn’t specify the number.

I had a blogosphere exchange about the poll at that time with someone who insisted it was an outlier and much ado about nothing since it was not the Gallup Daily weekly tracking. At that moment, Obama’s weekly tracking was at 45 and his 3 day rolling average was at 44. Apparently those were rosy, all-is-well numbers or something. Who knows? In Obama world, you probably can just cross out the poll number, fill in something else, write the word “believe” next to it, and it is so.

(If you’re really that curious and/or bored, you can read the exchange here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/25tpdsk)

Anyhow, I only bring this up because quelle surprise…

Obama’s Gallup Daily approval rating dropped to 42% this weekend.

Astroturfing on the public teat

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From Hot Air:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, will release a report today that claims that the Obama administration has created propaganda using federal funds to promote the agenda of Barack Obama and the Democrats. The charges would violate laws intended to separate politics from governance, which if substantiated would create a big problem for President Obama — assuming Congress wants to take this up as an issue.

[…]

Issa’s report looks at past propaganda from Republican and Democratic administrations, including those of Ronald Reagan, FDR, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, and concludes that the scope of Obama’s efforts far outstrip anything seen in modern administrations. He starts with the NEA controversy, which blew up last year and ended with Yosi Sargent’s resignation as NEA Communications Director. But Issa doesn’t stop there; he also specifies charges of propaganda from the Department of Justice:

In October 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) added Tracy Russo to direct the Department’s “new media efforts.” Russo, the Chief Blogger and Deputy Director of Online Communications for the John Edwards for President Campaign,58 was given the title “New Media Specialist.”59 Since October, Russo has served as the author of the Justice Department’s official blog.60

Shortly after Russo was hired, reports surfaced that indicated she was covertly attempting to shape public opinion by searching online for articles, blogs or other entries critical of the Administration and then anonymously, or through the use of a pseudonym, posting comments to those sites attacking the author or contents.61

The blogging and campaign communities refer to this propaganda tactic as “astroturfing.”62 Astroturfing is the action of using fake and anonymous postings on message boards and blogs to push a point of view or to create the appearance of grassroots support for a particular agenda.63

[…]

If the Democrats lose control of the House, Issa will hold the chair of the Oversight Committee and will have subpoena power. He then will also have the ability to ask for a formal GAO investigation of the White House’s activities in politicking rather than governing, and that will put a dent in Obama’s allegedly-illegal reach for his re-election campaign. It’s one of the ways that losing these midterms will mean difficult days ahead for this administration, which will be entirely self-inflicted.

Issa is a millionaire and a wingnut extraordinaire (he personally financed the recall of California’s last Democratic Governor, Gray Davis) but facts are facts.

I recall asking recently who was paying the salaries of Obama’s Troll Army these days. It looks like I may have my answer – we are.

Did Obamanation really expect the Congressional GOP to roll over and play dead? You’ll never hear “Impeachment is off the table” coming from the lips of a GOPer.
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TROLL PROPHYLACTIC:

Yes, Hot Air is a wingnut blog. Do you think the Journolistas are gonna touch this story with a 10-foot pole?

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Private Party

We keep getting Obama apologists here who insist that we “get over it”.  They are referring to the primaries of 2008.  We’re not going to get over it but in spite of all of our efforts, the Obama whiners and the DNC still do not seem to understand why the primaries of 2008 were the turning point for many of us newly created independent liberals and Democrats in Exile.  I think the reason for this is because they continue to see this as an internal accounting issue within a private party and it’s no big deal.  It’s just that one candidate who was a Democrat beat another candidate who was a Democrat.  Yeah, things got a little hairy and words were said that were misinterpreted as promises and some voters got screwed but, jeez, it’s two years already.  When are you people going to move on?

The answer is, never.  Or not until the Democrats understand the depth of anger we have in their violation of our trust.  So, let me explain it one more time to the dimwitted out there.

Let’s say that all of the crappy things the party pulled on us didn’t happen during a primary.  Let’s say it happened during the general election and the electoral college in the aftermath of that election.  In this scenario, the following might have happened:

– McCain’s supporters with clout meet with the federal elections authorities to make sure that there are caucuses in the south west and that these caucauses have disproportional representation at the electoral college later.

-McCain buses in his supporters to these caucuses and they use hooligan tactics to intimidate Obama’s voters and rig the caucus results.  Complaints by Obama’s campaign to the federal elections authorities fall on deaf ears.

-McCain takes advantage of some timing issues in Florida and Michigan to make sure that none of the votes count during election night.  BUT, knowing how bad that PR will be in the final analysis, works with the federal election authorities to make sure those votes count during the electoral college proceedings so that the voters in those states don’t cause a fuss and discredit the election results.

-McCain’s backers buy off a lot of electoral college superdelegates and delegates so that when it comes to count the electoral college votes, whole states that went overwhelmingly for Obama are given wholesale to McCain.  When the number of delegates needed for McCain to win is reached, none of the other states that voted overwhelmingly for Obama are allowed to cast their delegate votes.

McCain becomes our new president.

Now, if you think for one minute that anyone in this country would stand for such a thing, you’ve got another thing coming.  It’s one thing to have the supreme court decide an election in 2000 and many Democrats did not get over it.  It’s quite another to see violation after violation of fairness in elections happen right before our eyes by our own side.  No country in the world would respect such an election.  Our democracy would be thoroughly discredited and we would have massive demonstrations in the street.

The only reason Democrats were allowed to get away with it was because the whole mess wasn’t covered by the media to show what really happened.  AND because the Democratic party is a private party.  They can make or break the rules any way they want.  The only problem is that they used state taxpayer money to run their sham primary elections.  Millions of people went to those polls thinking that their votes counted.  In reality, it was a pointless exercise because the outcome was predetermined in some smoke filled room.

Now, I don’t care if the Democrats want to go back to smoke filled room politics.  But they should announce in advance that that’s their plan so I don’t waste my time campaigning and making phone calls and going door to door trying to convince people that my candidate is better.  And I don’t think any state, especially one the size of NJ, should be wasting precious tax dollars running fraudulent elections by people who don’t really give a damn what the voters think.  That money could be used to employ some teachers.

As for the results of the 2008 elections, well, nothing good every grows from a bad seed.  The results, as far as I and many others are concerned, are invalid.  The nomination was rigged for Obama and there is nothing anyone can say that would convince me otherwise.  If the Democrats don’t like it that we feel this way and are holding them responsible for the aftermath, tough.

Get over it.