Morning Briefing for TUESDAY, June 9, 2009
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1. Stop the IMF Bailout
We have a list of Congressmen to call to stop the U.S. from bailing out European banks
2. Under the Kennedy Bill, Your Health Plan will Change Dramatically
You will not get the healthcare Ted Kennedy can get
3. Is Rahm Emanuel Trying to Force Out Larry Summers?
Scapegoat, Thy Name Is Larry Summers.
4. Opposition to Gay Marriage Wins NY GOP Senate Control
So how exactly is embracing gay marriage supposed to help the GOP?
5. Senator Jim DeMint writes: Can The State Department Back Up Their Claim That North Korea Is Not Sponsoring Terrorism?
They will no doubt try.
6. Retired State Department analyst arrested for spying for Cuba.
And yet Obama wants to re-foster ties.
1. Stop the IMF Bailout
We have a list of Congressmen to call to stop the U.S. from bailing out European banks
It is bad enough that we’re bailing out domestic banks. Barack Obama now wants to bail out European banks via funding for the International Monetary Fund (”IMF”).
Humorously, there is a unique coalition forming on this because part of the legislation is also tied to war funding and the Graham-Lieberman amendment to stop the release of photos showing alleged torture. The whole thing has gotten rather convoluted. The Republicans in the House will probably vote against it en masse.
The Blue Dog Democrats — those Democrats in Republican leaning districts — are being forced to vote for it by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, but the pressure is only just mounting. If we mount pressure now by calling them and pinning them down, they’ll most likely change their mind and side with the GOP. There are enough of them to kill it.
Additionally, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are going to grind the Senate to a halt unless their amendment to prohibit the release of the photos gets enacted into law one way or the other. So one way or the other we’ll still get Graham-Lieberman, which is a good thing.
Call the Blue Dogs in Congress. Ask each one to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.
Click Here for More including the names and phone numbers of the Congressmen to call.
2. Under the Kennedy Bill, Your Health Plan will Change Dramatically
You will not get the healthcare Ted Kennedy can get
Keith Hennessey, whose bio is here, has analyzed the Kennedy Health Care Reform bill that leaked late in the evening of Sunday, June 7, 2009.
Hennessey’s analysis is straightforward, factual (based on the legislative language) and worth reading.
It is clear that under the Kennedy bill, the government will be in control of your health care plan, and that your current plan will change dramatically, cost much more and that you will be forced to buy one.
Click here to read Hennessey’s analysis.
3. Is Rahm Emanuel Trying to Force Out Larry Summers?
Scapegoat, Thy Name Is Larry Summers.
Articles on personality conflicts do not end up getting great exposure in the New York Times by coincidence. Someone has to push the story. Someone has to give the story credibility. And someone has to get sources to talk.
That is why Larry Summers should be starting his own death watch this morning. Jackie Calmes paints a picture of a sell out hindering the economic recovery of America. With unemployment numbers coming in even higher than what Obama said they’d be if his stimulus did not pass, someone must be made the scapegoat. Scapegoat, thy name is Larry.
How do I know it is Rahm Emanuel? Well, there are a couple of reasons why I know it.
First, have you ever, ever read a hit job like this in the New York Times where so many co-workers of the targer were willing to go on record or be named? We have Austin Goolsbee, Christina Romer, David Axelrod, and Tim Geithner all named. Who in the White House possibly has the clout to get them all to go on record?
And who, besides the President of the United States (and no, it can’t be him or the story would be different and contain speculation about the President’s confidence in Summers), is not talked about at all in the article? Rahm Emaneul, the Chief of Staff.
4. Opposition to Gay Marriage Wins NY GOP Senate Control
So how exactly is embracing gay marriage supposed to help the GOP?
Basically, New York Democrats finally won a majority in the State Senate in 2008 - the first majority they had in the Senate in 40 years. It seemingly gave them unified control of the state government - as long as they could reach some compromise between Democrat Senators who favored gay marriage, and those who opposed. That agreement eluded them for months. Senator Espada and several others sought assurances that the Senate would not vote on gay marriage legislation in this session. Eventually the two made a deal with Democrat leader Malcolm Smith, but they would not discuss the terms of that deal.
Now, as gay marriage legislation was gaining steam in New York, Espada and Hiram Montserrate have made good on their threat to quit the party. While I don’t see any confirmation yet that their switch is directly linked to same-sex marriage, that’s where the early betting is.
Hiram Monserrate is the politician who defected to give the GOP control of the NY Senate. Monserrate was arrested after a Christmas-time attack on his girlfriend with a broken beer bottle for having another man’s business card in her purse. The woman needed 20 stitches around her eye.
In reaction, the brand new incoming NY Democratic Senate Majority closed ranks around their man and one of their number, State Senator Eric Adams, went so far as to criticize the police for trying to “humiliate” the State Senator-Elect by making such a fuss of his girlfriends bottle-carved face.
Anyway, after a little flash-in-the-pan coverage of the entire incident, the rabidly Democratic/liberal New York media conveniently “forgot” all about Hiram “Slasher” Monserrate and his girlfriend. In case one doesn’t know, the Democratic media and its journalists are very capable of strategically ignoring violence against women for political ends. (see Kopechne, Mary Jo and one Kennedy, Edward Moore).
In other words, given a choice between weakening the Democrats’ hold of the NY State Senate - finally achieved after several long frustrating decades - and not risking that by ensuring that justice is done for a battered woman (as they certainly would have if Monserrate was a Republican), they predictably went with the former.
Which is why Hiram Monserrate just made a big mistake. The only reason his face and that of his erstwhile girlfriend’s with the twenty stitches have been largely off the radar in the NY media, and he hasn’t been hounded into stepping down before he spent a single day in court, was because of the ‘D’ he wore behind his name.
He just exchanged it for the hated ‘R’ - and now the journalists, their editors and all the liberals who have hitherto been all-too-happy to ignore his legal troubles so long as he was a vote for a Democratic Majority Leader are going to suddenly - very conveniently - rediscover their outrage.
5. Senator Jim DeMint writes: Can The State Department Back Up Their Claim That North Korea Is Not Sponsoring Terrorism?
They will no doubt try.
Last week, I led a group of Republican senators that wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to immediately relist North Korea as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and we also introduced an amendment to force the Obama Administration into action.
Yesterday on ABC’s This Week, I was pleased to hear Secretary Clinton’s response that they are now considering relisting North Korea. This is a very important step that I hope President Obama will agree to.
However, just days before Secretary Clinton’s statement, her spokesman bluntly claimed the State Department doesn’t believe there are any recent acts by North Korea that can be defined as supporting terrorism.
Last year, in a move many of us strongly disagreed with, President Bush removed North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List, not because they had stopped supporting terrorists but in hopes it would be a carrot to encourage them to join negotiations and halt development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.
They exploited Bush’s actions by accessing previously frozen funds and loans to speed along their weapons programs. In recent weeks, North Korea once again tested a nuclear weapon and proved to the world their program is alive and well and successfully launched a number of ballistic missiles. Right now, they are preparing to test another missile that has the capability of striking the United States.
The carrot didn’t work. It’s time for the stick.
6. Retired State Department analyst arrested for spying for Cuba.
And yet Obama wants to re-foster ties.
The words ‘treason,’ ‘traitor,’ or ‘betrayal’ do not appear anywhere in this narration of the career of a spy for regime which is an avowed enemy of the United States of America. Bush Derangement Syndrome, on the other hand? First paragraph. I’m almost convinced that this was deliberate self-parody on the WaPo’s part, except that I know other people who are equally this dead to irony.
Given that the traitor Myers started his career in 1978, we can only be grateful that he did not reveal the secrets of time travel to the Castro regime.
See also the Weekly Standard, Transterrestrial Musings, and American Thinker; the latter walks through the history of the two traitors for the last thirty years, and is probably the best bet for people wanting to familiarize themselves with events.
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