Who says the Democrats don't have a plan?

   

From the LA Times:

[R]epublicans are spotlighting that lineup, portraying it as extremist. They jumped on Conyers for calling for impeachment hearings against Bush, an idea Pelosi flatly dismisses. Republicans delight in pointing out that Hastings, before becoming a House member, was impeached as a federal judge.

Democrats say they believe such tactics are designed to mobilize conservatives and will not eclipse their efforts to present a more moderate face to swing voters. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last year made a point of recruiting conservative candidates and even some former Republicans for this year’s midterm election, in some cases muscling out more-liberal contenders who seemed likely to lose in Republican-leaning territory.

“The Democrats are going to retake the House of Representatives by electing conservative and moderate Democrats,” said Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), a member of the Blue Dog Coalition.

“We’re going to move our party back to the middle.”

I wonder, where it has been?  Over and over, they gave Bush what he wanted.  If he needed 3, 18 or 23 Dems in the senate, he got it.  If he needed 1 or 44 or 100 in the House, he got it.  There is NOTHING across three congresses that the Republicans cannot point to and say, “it was a bi-partisan vote”.

Those Republicans!, they can ferret out a stray drop of soft liberal sheep’s blood hiding under the conservative wolf’s still bloody dripping skin:

In Indiana, GOP Rep. John Hostettler is running behind Democrat Brad Ellsworth, a sheriff who opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But a new Hostettler radio ad says a vote for Ellsworth would be a vote for Pelosi.

“Pelosi will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda,” the ad says.

In Kentucky, ads by GOP Rep. Ron Lewis call attention to the fact that his Democratic opponent, retired Army Col. Mike Weaver, has accepted donations from Pelosi. “He is not a certified conservative,” Lewis said.

But Weaver, a state representative, is against abortion, gun control and same-sex marriage. He founded a conservative group in the state Legislature to push his party to the right.

In North Carolina, Shuler, who is running against GOP Rep. Charles H. Taylor, turned down encouragement to run for the House in 2002 as a Republican, despite his conservative views.

Shuler, a former quarterback for the Washington Redskins and New Orleans Saints, stuck with the Democratic Party, his spokesman said, because he wanted to “help those who cannot help themselves — and that’s the Democratic Party.”

But Shuler dodges the question of whether he would support Pelosi as speaker, saying he wants to interview all candidates for that post.

What I have heard is this sort runs on the Democratic ticket, as it works for an election [there already is a Republican] OR the demographics in a certain area, however conservative, still require a “D” next to the name.  I hear that is why Gene Taylor runs as a Dem… his district would not pull the lever for him in MS.

Whatever. 

All the pro life (which has little to do with abortion but for the vehicle it provides, “pro-life” is the Republican agenda) get together once they reach DC. 

Poor Dems. 

This is a Harper’s article from 2005  (word of warning, not an easy read in some parts, but informative about “PBA” as a vehicle) tracing the medical procedure labeled “partial birth abortion” by the pro lifers, tracing how the issue surfaced and gave the pro lifers extraordinary viability for nearly 15 years.

[T]he term “partial-birth abortion” was invented for purposes of writing legislation. There is no textbook reference to any operative procedure or medical state called “partial birth.” There are a few published medical references to “dilation and extraction,” or “intact dilation and evacuation,” both of which are terms certain physicians have given to the forceps-aided extraction of an aborted fetus all in one piece. One technique for intact removal was described in detail in 1992, when an Ohio physician got up at a National Abortion Federation meeting, presented a paper entitled “Dilation and Extraction for Late Second Trimester Abortion,” and inadvertently triggered the cross-country chain of events that escalated into what Kate Michelman, the recently retired president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, now says was the most difficult abortion issue she was ever called upon to confront. “Silver platter” is another way this sentiment is sometimes expressed, among abortion doctors and abortion-rights advocates, or “gift-wrapped.” By this they mean the swiftness, the devastating ease, with which they found themselves ceding their opponents control over the public imagination the month the first Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was introduced in Congress, nearly a decade ago.  [snip]

A straightforward page from the Alan Guttmacher Institute.  89% take place in the first trimestre, as procedures and testing advance, very early abortions (4 weeks and prior) are embraced.  But it is not the pro lifers goal to contain abortion.

No.  They want to contain women.  And the Democrats are helping.  Always have.

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Lemieux in TAPPED takes a look at the NJ court ruling. [from Madman]  Same sex unions or marriages or whatever.  The issue, as always, is RIGHTS.  Equality.  Equal Access.  Equal protection.  Equal right to privacy.

Full citizenship.

But no, mired in the fake “morals” clause…

Or take a gander at what the REAL Christians are saying already about that soft propagandist, Obama.

Did anyone read the TIME Magazine article on Obama? It really creeped me out. At one of Obama’s speaking engagements he was introduced in the following way: “He’s all of us! He’s not black! He’s not white! He’s not …” The speaker then faltered and realized that she was about to say that He’s not male or female. This kind of a description for anyone is worrysome. I believe that this is exactly how antichrist will be… Not to mention that everything seems to be falling into place for end-times events to occur. Just my humble opinion.

Yes, I believe he will win in 08 and we will be finished by 012. I feel in my soul that he is the AntiChrist. He’s too good to believe. Where did he come from? Where did his name come from? What evil forces are behind him?

Meanwhile Obama says this (laugh now, laugh later too):

And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans). 

Obama yet again:  

”And a pro-union Democrat doesn’t become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.”

Poor Dems.

I wrote a piece last fall on Obama and the utter foolishness of the Democrats… I only link to the x-post at BMT as it had an excellent comment from “RecordKeeper”:

Re: Amen (4.00 / 4)

And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).

Well, that’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a while. The Democratic Party has been broken and trained by the bullies of the GOP. They’ve accepted their new role as the “beta” party to the “alpha” Republicans.

I found Obama’s lecture — this was the term that came to me as well — cautious, reasonable, smooth, seductive, and completely fallacious. I couldn’t finish it because it made me feel enervated and agitated, at the same time. It’s a dangerous piece of writing, for that reason. It’s a winningly political, sugarcoated spoonful of medicine to intended to sedate uppity radicals.

What made me angriest was the part about how the people in Illinois, he’s met in his travels, don’t think Bush is a criminal, or a liar, etc, etc. So, why are these ill-informed, middle-of-the-road, people in utter denial, more important than me, or any of the people venting their spleens in the blogosphere. Why are politicians bending over backwards to cater to a mushy middle, with a total lack of civic awareness. That amounts to the ill-informed dictating policy. Frightening! No wonder we’re in such a mess.

“I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute.” ~ Rebecca West

by Recordkeeper (lavaughn@celestialhealing.com) on Sun Oct 2nd, 2005 at 02:42:25 PM EST

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UPDATE, 5:33 pm

From the AP in the LA Times:

“Ideologically, there will be more friends coming,” said Nelson, one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate. “The center will have a great deal of influence.”

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Sun is blocked by the heavy smoke from a fast moving Esperanza fire. Fire crew is blocked by the fast moving brush over highway 243.  (Irfan Khan / LAT)  Oct 26, 2006

“These winds were devil winds,” Boss said. “They came out of nowhere.”
 

Sometimes the CA wildfires seem to mimic the undertone in the nation – or the wars.   The fires from the Santa Ana winds that come in off the desert, then blow hot and hard across the mountains down into the valleys and canyons, this fire, they say, blasted to life in the middle of the night, from arson… Earlier, residents in Riverside Co. were told to “shelter in place” … now they are running for their lives.

One very bad day in Iraq a couple of years ago, the fires from the Santa Ana winds exploded and leapt the coastal road, to the sea.

[G]orgonio View Road, where five firefighters were consumed by flames — four of them dying — is well known to Nye Frank, 68, a former firefighter.  “It’s not a good place to be in a fire,” said Frank, 68, “With winds blowing east to west, you are in a high place, with flames coming uphill. You are quickly in harm’s way.”  [...]

Winds remained so strong they rumbled like earthquakes and shook cars. Flames sometimes a hundred feet high erupted along Highway 243 from Banning toward Idyllwild as the fire grew in strength.  Fires like rolling balls descended across roads where people were trying to escape, forcing cars to retreat back up the road.

The fire wrought its most serious destruction on rural Twin Pines Road, not far from the area of greasewood and scrub oak stands where the firefighters died. [snip]

  
      (Irfan Khan / LAT)  Oct 26, 2006

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew.  I could see why.  The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf.  The heat was surreal.  The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.”  My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete.  One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. …

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.  The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.  Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires.  For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.  Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.  The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Excerpt from Slouching towards Bethlehem, © by Joan Didion.

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UPDATE, 11 AM Friday

She did not support it before she projected she would not oppose it in the future, dependent on what NY state lege and Spitzer may do… I think that is what Hillareeeeeeeee said here… Snips from The Note:

Sen. Clinton makes news on same-sex marriage:
Sen. Clinton told a group of gay elected officials Wednesday that she would not oppose same sex marriage in New York if the state legislature and governor enacted it. LINK

According to the Gay City News, when Sen. Clinton was asked about plans Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic candidate for governor, has to introduce a gay marriage bill, Sen. Clinton said: “if our governor and our Legislature support marriage in New York, I’m not going to be against that. . . So I feel very comfortable with being able to refute anybody who tries to pit us or pit me against Eliot.” LINK

During a May 26, 2005 interview on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” Sen. Clinton said: “Well, I don’t know many Democrats who support gay marriage. In fact, I don’t and haven’t for, you know, years before I became a Senator.”

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UPDATE, 5:30 on the Pacific…

Uh no… it means apparatchiks took direction well… but call it “love”… if you wish. 

Feel the Love

by Jerome Armstrong, Fri Oct 27, 2006 at 08:26:04 PM EST

DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel Statement issued the following statement on recent “Use It or Lose It” efforts by Democratic House Members and grassroots activists to support the DCCC and Democratic candidates:

“Throughout the cycle, the remarkable grassroots movement for change has buoyed Democratic efforts to expand the playing field, support our candidates, and ultimately win a Democratic majority that can take our country in a new direction,” said Rahm Emanuel. “The recent unity shown between grassroots activists and Democratic Members to ensure that we can compete in dozens of newly competitive districts is heartening to the DCCC and all of our Democratic challengers.”

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Tags: Chris Bowers, Rahm Emanuel, Use It, DCCC (all tags)

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