Sen. Scott Brown today on ObamaCare

'Washington at its very worst' [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Scott Brown on the rush to pass the Obamacare mess, in today's weekly GOP address:

“Maybe you remember what President Obama promised in his State of the Union address. He said he was going to finally focus on jobs and the economy for the remainder of this year. I applauded him for that. Well, here it is, it’s almost spring. And what is he out there talking about again? That same 2,700-page, multi-trillion dollar health care legislation.

“So, an entire year has gone to waste. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the President still hasn't gotten the message.

“Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst – the presumption that they know best, and they’re going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.

“And, when politicians start thinking like that, they don’t let anything get in their way – not public opinion, not the rules of fair play, not even their own promises.

“They pledged transparency. Instead, we have a health care bill tainted by secrecy, concealed cost, and full of backroom deals– and that’s just not right. They should do better. The American people expect more.

“They pledged a true bipartisan effort. Instead, they have resorted to bending the rules, and they now intend to seize control of health care in America on a strict party-line vote.

“In speech after speech on his health care plan, the President has tried to convince us that what he is proposing will be good for America. But, how can it be good for America if it raises taxes by a half trillion dollars and costs a trillion dollars or more to implement? In addition, how can it be good if it takes another half a trillion dollars away from seniors on Medicare, and still includes all the backroom deals you have been hearing about for months?

“Well, for the past year or more, the new establishment in Washington has tried again and again to sell this plan to the American people. But the Americans aren't buying it, and for good reason. And now, what’s going on is a last, desperate power play. They actually tell us that passing the bill is necessary, if only to prove that something can get done in Washington.

“Well, I haven’t been here very long, but, I can tell you this much already: Nothing has distracted the attention and energy of the nation’s capital more than this disastrous detour. And, the surest way to return to the people’s business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won’t leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.

Andrew C. McCarthy on why Americans have the right to know what positions government lawyers have taken.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117613313731980.html

Another good article by Andy McCarthy; re the "Al Qaeda 7" in the Justice Dept.

And this:

"The Case for Unpopular Clients" [Jonah Goldberg]

I'm really surprised that the opposing view the Journal picked to match up against Andy's op-ed was so weak. It's not weak because it's bad, per se. It's just irrelevant to most of the issues. Stephen Jones argues that lawyers should be willing to take on unpopular criminal defendants as clients. Okay, nobody I know disagrees with that, and he makes an entirely adequate case for it.

But that's not what the debate is about. The debate is about, among other things: Whether DOJ should be able to hide the history of appointed lawyers from Congress and the public; Whether Gitmo detainees are criminal defendants at all; whether volunteering pro bono for declared enemy combatants is even analogous to working for other "unpopular clients" or whether that pro bono work was really an effort to use the legal system as a Trojan Horse to change national security policy. And on these and other fronts, Stephen Jones' argument is just deficient or non-responsive.

For starters, most of his essay is dedicated to the hardships he endured representing Tim McVeigh. Just going from his version of events, I'm entirely sympathetic to his case. He didn't deserve any of that. But what does any of it have to do with what we're talking about? He was a "draftee" into the case, by his own admission. That alone makes his experience different. Throw in the fact McVeigh was an American citizen, not a member of a foreign terror organization, and that his whole piece is almost entirely a response to an argument no one is making, and one has to wonder why the Journal even bothered running this piece. It would have been a lot more edifying if they found someone to actually respond to Andy's far more substantial argument.

That said, there is one point where Jones scores a glancing blow. If you watch the Keep America Safe ad there is the insinuation — or at least reasonable people can infer it — that KAS is suggesting the "al Qaeda 7" are pro-al Qaeda. If that's the insinuation some are trying to make, I think that's counter-productive. I don't think these lawyers are traitorous or anything like that (which is not to say that it's impossible). I think they subscribe to a coherent ideological view about the war on terror and priesthood of the lawyer class. I think that view is dangerous, wrong and naive, but it ain't treason.

Is the Gitmo Bar Pro-Islamist? [Andy McCarthy]

I appreciate Jonah's kind words. In fairness to Stephen Jones, I didn't know about his essay and I don't know whether he was told I'd be writing one. It wasn't pitched to me by the Journal as a point/counterpoint thing. They asked me to write about the issue from my perspective, and the only guidance I got was a suggestion that I address some precedents if any seemed relevant. (I thought Eric Holder's Heller brief was highly relevant — particularly, the fact that no one came close to suggesting that the position he staked out on the Second Amendment as a private lawyer was off-limits in considering what he might do as a top policy-making official.) I imagine they did the same thing with Mr. Jones. By contrast, when I did a point/counterpoint thing for USA Today earlier this week, I was told in broad outline what themes their editorial would hit (I wasn't shown the actual editorial) so I had a better idea what I needed to respond to.

Now, to the more important question posed in the last paragraph of Jonah's post. Let's put DOJ's ten (and counting) Gitmo lawyers to the side and just talk about the volunteer Gitmo bar in general. I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist. Not all of them, but many of them. The assistance many of them provided went disturbingly beyond any conventional notion of "legal representation." (And let's not forget that what Lynne Stewart called her "legal representation" of the Blind Sheikh was later found by a jury to be material support to terrorism.) I expect we'll be hearing much more about this in the coming days.

Islamism is a much broader and more mainstream (in Islam) ideology than suggested by the surprisingly ill-informed comments Charles Krauthammer made about a week ago (see Dr. K's commentary here; Mark Steyn's reaction, with which I agree, is here.) Jihadist terrorists are a subset of the Islamists, but many Islamists disagree with the terrorists' means — they are mostly on the same page as far as ends are concerned.

Personally, I don't think there is much difference, if any, between Islam and Islamism. In that assessment, I'm not much different from Turkey's Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claims it is "very ugly" for Westerners to draw these distinctions between Muslims as "moderate" or "Islamist" — “It is offensive and an insult to our religion," he says, because "there is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it."

Islamists are Muslims who would like to see sharia (Islamic law) installed. That is the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society. It is the purpose of jihad. The terrorists are willing to force sharia's installation by violent jihad; other Islamists have varying views about the usefulness of violence, but they also want sharia, and their jihadist methods include tactics other than violence. I reluctantly use the term "Islamist" rather than "Islam" because I believe there are hundreds of millions of Muslims (somewhere between a third to a half of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims) who do not want to live under sharia, and who want religion to be a private matter, separated from public life. It is baffling to me why these people are Muslims since, as I understand Islam, (a) sharia is a basic element, and (b) Islam rejects the separation of mosque and state. But I'm not a Muslim, so that is not for me to say. I think we have to encourage the non-sharia Muslims and give them space to try to reform their religion, so I believe it's worth labeling the sharia seekers "Islamists" in order to sort them out. But I admit being very conflicted about it because I also concede that the Islamists have the more coherent (and scary) construction of Islam. We wouldn't be encouraging reform if we really thought Islam was fine as is.

In any event, Islamist ideology is multi-faceted. You can be pro-Islamist, and even pro-Qaeda, without signing on to the savage Qaeda methods. And the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists. That's a fair question, but a very uncomfortable one to ask. Indeed, as Jonah broaches it, he softens it to whether the insinuation that the lawyers are pro-Qaeda is "counter-productive." That's an interesting question but a very different one from whether the insinuation is true.

In a column a few days ago, I addressed the insinuation this way:

“Al-Qaeda Seven” reminds me of another legal shorthand expression: “mob lawyer.” It’s a common expression — everyone uses it. I’d wager that a number of the DOJ’s Gitmo lawyers have either used it or been in conversations where it rolled effortlessly, and without objection, off the tongues of other prosecutors. “Mob lawyers” are lawyers who regularly represent members and associates of the mafia. It’s such a commonplace that even the mob lawyers call themselves “mob lawyers.” It’s a handle; it doesn’t mean the people who use the term don’t see the moral difference between mobsters who commit heinous crimes and the lawyers who defend them. Same with the “al-Qaeda Seven.”

Much of the commentary on this point, including from some people who usually know better, has been specious. The normally sensible Paul Mirengoff, for example, huffs, “It is entirely inappropriate to suggest that these lawyers share the values of terrorists or to dub the seven DOJ lawyers ‘The al-Qaeda Seven.’” The values of the terrorists? Which values?

Jihadists believe it is proper to massacre innocent people in order to compel the installation of sharia as a pathway to Islamicizing society. No one for a moment believes, or has suggested, that al-Qaeda’s American lawyers share that view. But jihadist terrorists, and Islamist ideology in general, also hold that the United States is the root of all evil in the world, that it is the beating heart of capitalist exploitation of society’s have-nots, and that it needs fundamental, transformative change.

This, as I argue in a book to be published this spring, is why Islam and the Left collaborate so seamlessly. They don’t agree on all the ends and means. In fact, Islamists don’t agree among themselves about means. But before they can impose their utopias, Islamists and the Left have a common enemy they need to take down: the American constitutional tradition of a society based on individual liberty, in which government is our servant, not our master. It is perfectly obvious that many progressive lawyers are drawn to the jihadist cause because of common views about the need to condemn American policies and radically alter the United States.

That doesn’t make any lawyer unfit to serve. It does, however, show us the fault line in the defining debate of our lifetime, the debate about what type of society we shall have. And that political context makes everyone’s record fair game. If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so.

Obama, Biden & Hilary Clinton showing true colors: Not Friends of Israel

Hilary, Biden and probably Obama, as Senators pandered as friends of Israel. They supported a united Jerusalem as Israel's capital. They supported moving US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Now they want to deny Jews the right to live and build in Jerusalem; calling it provocative and detrimental to peace.

What bullshit ! and what a horrible way to treat a friend and ally.

US ponders denying Israel arms needed for conflict with Iran

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report March 13, 2010, 9:53 PM (GMT+02:00)

Ehud Barak meets Robert Gates in D.C Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu convened his inner cabinet Saturday night, March 12, to discuss the spiraling crisis with Washington and his first response.

DEBKAfile's military and Washington sources report: The Obama administration is considering withholding from Israel military items urgently needed in case of a flare-up of hostilities with Iran. This would further ratchet up the mounting row over Israel's decision to build another 1,600 homes in E. Jerusalem. The requests were filed by defense minister Ehud Barak as recently as Feb. 26, when he visited Washington and met defense secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

In an exceptionally harsh phone call to Netanyahu Friday, March, Clinton herself hinted at this possibility while administering a dressing-down on the East Jerusalem housing decision and its announcement during Vice president Joe Biden's visit.

Reporting on that phone call, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley disclosed: "The secretary said she could not understand how this happened, particularly in light of the United States' strong commitment to Israel's security."

Washington correspondents interpreted this as a threat to withhold items vital for Israel's security unless the prime minister reversed that decision (which Palestinians now demand as the precondition for resuming peace talks).

Our military sources report that the Barak arms list is tailored to a potential four-front offensive against Israel launched by Iran and its allies. It includes systems needed by the Israeli Air Force, certain types of missiles and advanced electronic equipment. During his last visit, the defense minster complained the list had been pending in Washington for more than three months and the sands for a possible conflict were running out fast. He stressed that it was essential for these items to reach Israel before a flare-up occurred. The urgency was such that he suggested that if they could not be supplied to Israel at short notice, they should at least be held ready meanwhile in the emergency stores of the US bases in Israel's Negev.

Gates promised Barak to study the list and let him have his answer in the coming days, but none has so far been received.

Some circles in the United States and many in Israel say the Obama administration is blowing the crisis up with deliberate intent. American-Jewish criticism was led Saturday night by the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman, who issued this statement: "We are shocked and stunned at the Administration’s tone and public dressing down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem

Defense sources in Washington reported Saturday the view that the Obama administration, which has never cultivated warm relations with the Netanyahu government, has seized on the Jerusalem housing spat as a device for restraining Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear sites, a step which the White House strenuously opposes.

Clinton warns Netanyahu US-Israeli relations at risk
DEBKAfile Special Report March 12, 2010, 11:39 PM (GMT+02:00)

Tags: Hillary Clinton Jewish housing in E. Jerusalem Joe Biden Netanyahu

Hillary Clinton

The crisis in US-Israeli relations took a sharp turn for the worse Friday night, March 12, with a phone call from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the relationship was at risk unless Israel toed the administration's line in renewed talks with the Palestinians. Israel must take immediate steps to demonstrate it was interested in renewing efforts for a Middle East agreement, he was told - a reference to sweeping concessions, including halting construction in Jerusalem.

It was the sudden announcement of an added 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem's Ramat Shlomo in the middle of Vice President Joe Biden's visit which tipped the already tense relations into this crisis. Netanyahu told Biden it had come about without his knowledge.
Two days after Biden condemned the announcement, Clinton delivered a tough message, saying Washington considered the announcement "a deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president's trip."

She said she could not understand how this happened,"particularly in light of the US strong commitment to Israel's security."

DEBKAfile: The administration is clearly taking advantage of the weakness Netanyahu projected during the Biden visit to swallow its Iran policy, over which Israel feels it has been jilted, as well as its Palestinian policy.
Our exclusive analysis earlier detailed some of the steps, including those of the visiting U

S Vice President, which exacerbated the misunderstandings between Jerusalem andWashington, as follows:

The fallout from the US Vice President Joe Biden's 48 hours in Israel undid a year of effort by the Netanyahu government to build a foreign policy and an understanding with Washington as the bedrock of a coordinated proactive policy on Iran, DEBKAfile's exclusive sources report. Instead of ironing out misunderstandings which have marred relations, the visitor struck out on his own as America's would-be Middle East policy overlord. Under the unrelenting pressure of the visit and its mishaps, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his closest ally, defense minister Ehud Barak, almost came to blows.

The announcement approving 1,600 new homes for the existing East Jerusalem suburb of Ramat Shlomo popped out at a particularly unfortunate moment. It may have been meant to mark Israeli resentment over Washington's ineffectual handling of the Iranian nuclear drive. Instead, the announcement hit the Israeli prime minister in the face and gave Biden a large whip for beating the Israeli government down.

He was not the only one. Barak, leader of Labor, the senior partner in Netanyahu's Likud-led coalition, ran alongside Biden, both using the Jerusalem housing announcement to intimidate, punish and bend the prime minister to their will over the Jerusalem housing mishap.

Barak accused Netanyahu of recklessly causing irreparable damage to relations with the Obama administration and wrecking the diplomatic basis for a military strike against Iran's nuclear industry.
The breakdown of the partnership which has dominated Israeli policy-making in the past year is of consequence not only for domestic political equilibrium, but also for the Netanyahu government's world standing

Sources close to these events told DEBKAfile that the prime minister came close to cracking under Barak's onslaught, losing his cool and acting jumpy and confused. He could have calmly ordered the suspension of the 1,600 housing approvals for the four months allotted negotiations with the Palestinians - as he did for an ambitious scheme announced byJerusalem mayor Nir Barkat for Silwan, shortly before Biden's arrival.
He refrained from this step for two reasons:

First, he could not afford to be seen folding under pressure to halt new construction inJerusalem, although implementation of this particular scheme was at least two years away.

Second, he could not be sure the Interior Minister, ultra-Orthodox Shas leader Ellie Yishai - who holds jurisdiction over the planning commission - would not disobey him and throw the government into crisis. Netanyahu would be finished in his Likud party and much of the country if he lost his government by interrupting construction in Jerusalem, a highly sensitive issue

Caught on the horns of this dilemma, the prime minister hesitated too long, giving the Palestinians a chance to cash in on the accelerating crisis and lay down fresh terms for resuming peace talks. Finally, he decided to pacify the American leader and the defense minister by creating a new mechanism to prejudge all building permits for Jerusalem before they were processed.

By slowing down planning permission for construction, this device will have the effect of extending the West Bank building freeze to Jerusalem as well. Netanyahu has shown himself to be easy prey for pressure-wielders.

The maelstrom centering the prime minister obscured the fault-lines in the Obama administration shown up by Biden's handling of his Middle East trip.

He came to the region with three missions: to sweeten US-Israeli relations, celebrate the launching of indirect Israel-Palestinian peace talks and underscore the commonality of US-Israeli purpose on Iran.
In the event, Biden fell down on all three counts, launching instead an independent Middle East posture at odds with the White House's avowed policies.

This deviation was expressed in five ways:

1. He hardly ever mentioned Barack Obama in any of his political appearances, preferring to say "we" - in other words, America, which he represented in his visit.

2. While affirming American friendship for Israel and concern for its security, Biden's recurring theme was this: "I can promise the people in Israel that we will confront as allies every security challenge that we will face."

Here, too, "we" - meaning the United States - would define the security challenge and decide how to confront it, an attitude which was deeply resented in Jerusalem.

3. At his lecture to Tel Aviv University Thursday, March 11, before his departure, Biden said: "The United States is resolved to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon" - a general statement with no commitment.
Until then, he had shunned any mention of Iran at all, but members of his party leaked word that he was leaning hard on Israel to prevent its resort to military action against Iran's nuclear projects, without however offering any commitment on painful sanctions.

Saudi Arabia and its Arab Gulf neighbors got wind of the slugging-match over Iran inJerusalem and were alarmed enough to demand clarifications from Washington. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sent post haste from Kabul to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi with assurances that the Obama administration had not abandoned the road to a showdown withIran, whether economic or military.

4. The Biden party did not include Middle East envoy George Mitchell, but he did bring Dennis Ross along.
This seemed almost natural in view of Ross's standing in the National Security Council as an expert on Iran.

However, given his long experience in Israeli and Palestinian affairs, the Vice President appeared to have chosen him as his senior adviser for the visit and sidelined presidential envoy Mitchell - yet another significant departure from the policy direction taken by the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

5. And finally, instead of smoothing ruffled feathers in Jerusalem with interviews to the host media, Vice President Biden snubbed them all and granted the only interview of his trip to the Arabic Al Jazeera TV, whose news content is sharply slanted against Israel, US military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Western war on terror.

By signing off his Israel visit with an Al Jazeera interview, Joe Biden made it perfectly clear exactly how he feels about the Jewish state.

"Unfortunately and Inadvertantly Missed" Uh Huh. Eric Holder

What a stand up guy ... a true roll model as Attorney General ... UGH.

'In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed.' [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

After not responding to NRO for comment, the Department of Justice did respond to Fox News yesterday about our Burck/Perino piece on Eric Holder's non-disclosure of his Jose Padilla amicus briefs during his confirmation hearings.

It's not like these were dental records Eric Holder left out. It's a little more than "unfortunate." It's disingenuous. And it just happens to be about our national security. And he just happens to be attorney general now.


Re: 'In preparing thousands of pages for submission, it was unfortunately and inadvertently missed.' [Andy McCarthy]

K-Lo, I think this crusade against the attorney general that you and Bill and Dana are on is just shameful, and if I were a GOP Beltway Barrister, why I'd be pulling the gang together this very minute for a group preen, a quick letter, and maybe a few guest spots on MSNBC's Countdown — you know, to raise the tone of our public discourse.

Look, I don't know if John Adams ever accidentally forgot to remember one of his briefs in the Boston Massacre case, but Mr. Holder was clearly acting in the proud tradition of lawyers who zealously represent their unpopular clients themselves by accidentally, mistakenly omitting, inadvertently of course, to include, er, unpopular information in response to a document demand.

And what's the big whup anyway? Padilla was an obscure case — it's not like anyone in the country was talking about an American citizen dispatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a second wave of post-9/11 mass-murder attacks on U.S. soil. It's not as if Holder's predecessor as attorney general had written a 100-page legal opinion as a district judge presiding over Padilla's case. And it's not as though we're in a situation where, only two months ago, the attorney general's memory might have been jogged by, say, writing a five-page letter discussing the Padilla case at length and in a manner strikingly similar to the arguments in the missing brief — and it's certainly not as if such a letter was prompted by the fact that the attorney general had ordered that the Christmas bomber be Mirandized and charged in the criminal justice system . . . just like he argued in the brief should have happened to Padilla.
Furthermore, you know full well that if this sort of inadvertent accidental totally innocent oversight had happened to, say, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, or Michael Mukasey, the Senate Judiciary Committee would have completely understood that these very unfortunate accidental honest mistakes happen all the time.

You guys need to get with the program. So the attorney general, while he was in private practice at a firm that openly bragged about its "pro bono" representation of numerous Gitmo detainees, chose during our war with al-Qaeda to file a brief on behalf of an al-Qaeda operative who tried to kill lots of Americans. So he argued that such people ought to be treated as criminal defendants swaddled in the Bill of Rights rather than enemy combatants detained for interrogation and war-crimes commissions. So what? What, are you, like, saying that the positions Holder voluntarily took as a private lawyer zealously representing unpopular clients might shed some light on the policies he would implement in the completely unrelated role of top Justice Department official.

That's the most shameful, over the top, outrageous, and, frankly, disgusting thing I've ever heard. Somebody call Keith Olbermann!

You Gotta Know When To Hold Them; Know When to Fold Them

Know When To Walk Away & Know When to Run.

Prez Obama ... this means you ... time to fold them pal.

@stephenfhayes

Obama today: "The time for talk is over." Obama, July 21, 2009: "The time for talk is through." http://bit.ly/3o0J9

Wow, even cable nets are passing on Obama's HCR speech, part of WH's "closing argument."


TurboTax Evader Timmy G at it again w/ his partisan BS ...

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/03/congressman-tells-geithner-to-expect-gop-tidal-wave-in-november-due-to-soaring-deficits.html

Are The Democrats Eating Their Own ?

Massa Messes with the White House [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

A reader:

Obama asked Patterson not to run for governor. He refused and he has been destroyed. Massa was a no vote, and he has been destroyed.

Coincidence? I think not.

Remember during the Chrysler bankruptcy, recalcitrant bondholders were threatened that the full force of the White House press corps would be turned against them, should they not comply. Now we know what that looks like.


Could Massa Rescind His Resignation? [Daniel Foster]
He left the door open:

Responding to a caller to his weekly radio show on WKPQ Power 105 FM, a recording of which was made available via the Web site of local station 13 WHAM-TV, Massa said: “I’m not going to be a Congressman as of 5 o’clock [Monday] afternoon. The only way to stop that is for me to rescind my resignation. That’s the only way to stop it. And the only way that’s going to happen is if this becomes a national story.”

Well, it has certainly become that. Still, Massa also repeatedly said during his radio show that staying in Congress would mean the continuation of the House ethics panel investigation:
“That’s very kind of you, but understand what that means for me," Massa said in a response to a caller who suggested he not resign. “It means that a group of lawyers are going to try to rip me and my family limb from limb. And you’ve already seen it in the newspapers. … It’s a piranha feeding frenzy.”

In any event, we'll know by five.


The Naked Truth [Daniel Foster]

Another gem from The Eric Massa Radio Hour, this one on Rahm Emanuel taking a page out of LBJ's book and doing his bullying in the showers of the Congressional gym:

"I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me."

Audio of the anecdote over at RCP.


He's Resigning [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I feel like I am watching a soap opera, but . . . Massa is apparently sticking with the resignation. Roll Call reports:

Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) will follow through with his resignation, scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m. Monday, his chief of staff confirmed.

Massa suggested to a New York radio station on Sunday that he could rescind his resignation after asserting that an ethics investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed an aide may have been orchestrated by Democratic leaders to get him out of office before the health care vote.

"The comments on the radio came from constituents calling in, saying, 'You should rescind.' And that's how that fire got fed. He addressed them by thanking them for the comments, but the resignation is still effective," Massa Chief of Staff Joseph Racalto said in an interview outside the New York Democrat's office in the Longworth House Office Building.

ObamaCare & The We Don't Give a Flying F--- Administration

Axelrod's F-Bomb [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

The New York Times gives us a glimpse into David Axelrod's mood, which confirms exactly what the president tends to exude when talking about critics:

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

Unfortunately for the White House, these days "the peanut gallery" critics more often than not are reflecting what many Americans outside the Beltway are saying. And that's not just an Election Day concern for those in the White House. Their jobs there entail representing those who sent them to Washington in the first place.


'A Budgetary Disaster' [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Don't miss Jim Capretta's latest on what the White House is pushing on us on health care


Glenn Reynolds questions whether the gov't has the consent of the governed:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Consent-of-the-governed---and-the-lack-thereof-86628027.html