Senator Susan Collins of Maine breaks with Obama on the “trigger” proposal
Even more astounding is that, by taking such a stance, Senator Collins is breaking with her political twin sister, Senator Olympia Snowe. The two RINOs from Maine vote together so often they seem joined at the hip, and the “trigger” has been Snowe’s baby so far.
“Is it safe?”
Snowe’s position must not be safe, even in Maine.
Oblio: I think Collins’s position could be significant. Maine is a very liberal state, although not as liberal as Massachusetts. If she’s against the trigger, my guess is that she’s gotten a surprising earful from the people of Maine.
I read some of the comments contained at the end of the CNN article. I can’t help but wonder where people get their information. Probably from CNN.
I just saw on Drudge that Snowe said that the public option has no chance of passing the senate.
I noticed that the number of uninsured jumped to 50 million this weekend in the Phil.Inq. and on Yahoo. Anyone else notice the big jump?Andrea
The gals from Maine are not to be trusted.
Lucius,
I have to agree with you, but I think that the largest demonstration ever held in Washington DC (I think, it is, can anybody confirm or correct that?) sent a message that caused no small amount of fear in the present political class.
If politicians are keen on anything, it’s their own survival.
Tim P–I was one of those many thousands on the lawn of the Capitol Building shouting “Can You Hear Us Now,” backed up by the voices of a million or more filling the Mall, and I suspect that Collins heard us, loud and clear.
That scuttling sound you heard was Democrat politicians beating feet (number indeterminate) for the nearest baseboard.
Good. We have their attention. Now all we need to do is make sure that all the invertebrate Republicans (which would be most of them) understand that we’re tired of their crap too.
It’s time for the idea of a Federal politician to once again become an honorable profession. We will always have crooks at the top, but there’s no reason that being hopelessly corrupt should be considered normal. There has been little or no accountability for too many decades, and it took the impending national disaster of Mr. Entry-Level-Executive Obama for a critical mass of people to realize it. If the country doesn’t implode, this could be the watershed event that finally turns the Ship of State away from the rocks and back out into the ocean of Liberty and Prosperity where she used to sail.
“I have to agree with you, but I think that the largest demonstration ever held in Washington DC (I think, it is, can anybody confirm or correct that?”
I’ve been trying google for a while to figure this out – it’s not that easy to do.
First off, the amount of … exaggeration is huge. For instance one anti-war protest claimed at least three million yet didn’t even cover a third of the narrow path of the mall (which the parks service rates at no more than a million can fit), many places just take those at face value.
It also seems that most “official” stories add up all the different cities. For example you will usually find Feb 15, 2003 as officially the largest protest in history with official estimates being 6-10 million people. But it took *sixty* countries to achieve that number. However Rome was estimated to have 3 million in the city (go look up aerial photo’s, the DC protest appears MUCH larger so I have to wonder which is wrong).
My guess is that, yes it is the largest yet we will probably never really know for sure. I say this because I note that *all* “record numbers” of 1.5-2 million protesting were taken as a national estimate. If we were to take that path, well, we would probably be bumping up on the low end of the Feb 15,2003 world record.
I generally figure that those that care about recording such things would rather this one disappear. As such I doubt many are looking to validate the numbers.
Reading the cnn comment is hillarious. The CNN audience seems to have the lowest common denominator.
Here are some examples:
1. The people at the rallies were paid company shills,they are worse than the overpaid union workers,making blood money from average Americans
2. To hell with the republicans. Pass the public option under reconcilliation. They will scream and cry and stomp their feet, no matter what the democrats do. The republicans are lying and many fools have fallen for it. The republicans don’t care about Americans. They would rather kill ant democratic propsal then let the democrats have a win on anything. They would rather more Americans die from lack of insurance, than get anything passed. This proves republicans are anti-American and unpatriotic.
3.If this is a “moderate Republican” we just ought to forget about any of them. Move on and plow the party of racist old white people into the ground!
uh…. wow newsweek. wow.. wow..
http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/09/12/newsweek-makes-the-case-for-killing-grandma/
Which character does she sound like? Monty Python, SNL, or Barney Fife impersonating a woman? She sounds like somebody.
Thomas Sowell unplugged. 🙂
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/09/10/listening_to_a_liar_part_ii
he he
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/clean-conservatives-filthy-liberals.html
Filthy liberals… JUST PLAYIN’ !
Here’s a surprise, Sen. Diane Feinstein:
After Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night, Feinstein remained skeptical about the wholesale overhauls to the nation’s health care system that Obama contemplates.
“I just find that if you’re going to remake a sixth of the American economy, it’s very difficult at this time of great economic angst,” Feinstein said in an interview with The Chronicle.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/12/MNBR19LPMV.DTL#ixzz0R3gThqSu
We’re talking San Francisco, California here.
The death panel debate is really very simple. Let those liberals who believe it should be made so sign up for it.
If or when they contract an illness that is life threatening, send them home with pain pills. An outer ear infection, if left untreated, can eventually kill you. Those who want to live, and can be helped by modern medicine to continue to do so, will receive the medical attention necessary. As time goes on, liberals will diminish at an increasing rate.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that liberals must believe that what they are proposing, across the board, will not affect them in the negative at all. I just don’t see how they can even entertain that thought process.
Huxley, my theory has been that they continue to believe there is plenty of money, it’s just in the hands of the wrong people. They trust Obama, et alia to get it away from them so we can all have a new pony with our health care.
Wolla Dalbo,
Good for you! I wish I could have been there.
Unfortunately, it’s a long way from Alaska.
What were some of your impressions of events, if you could share them with us?
Tim P–As I said it was a happy crowd, not a grim one, not a really angry or menacing crowd either that I saw. It was not a charge the Bastille “mob,” but more like a, lets get together, talk to one another, and shout loud enough so that our representatives, our employees, working in the temporary quarters we’ve allowed them to use, in a Capitol building we paid for, hear us and represent us for once.
There were a million signs it seems, mostly hand made and pressing individual viewpoints on almost every conceivable issue–some funny, some very artistic–I loved two signs on polls I saw ahead of me in the march up Pennsylvania Ave. that had two fat little piglets dangling from them, a few signs with hammer and sickles here and there, but no references to Hitler that I saw, and certainly nothing that I would consider racist.
The overarching general message I took away was that, ordinary citizens were tired of and frightened of the intrusion of big government into every aspect of their lives, its ruinous overspending, and its arrogant, puffed up, dictatorial, overreaching and unresponsiveness. As Glenn Beck diagnosed, its widespread corruption.
This was about as “salt of the earth” a crowd as you can imagine, with all races and socio/economic groups represented. I did note that there were a few, mostly black “entrepreneurs,” circulating selling buttons with “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flags on them and sumilar things but, again noting particularly harsh. Being a crowd of more than a million–and I do think there were more than a million–the case has been made that it was possibly two million there–I’m sure there were a few idiots with nasty attitudes or signs somewhere in the crowd but, if there were, I didn’t see them. On the Capitol lawn, lots of lawn chairs and ground sheets and groups sitting together–getting more and more crowded–but a lot of interchanges between people too. Speeches–thank God–tended to be very short, with bloviators cut off by the band when their few minutes were up.
I remember standing in line to use the men’s bathroom at the National Arboretum, at the bottom of Capitol Hill–as usual, a short line for men, a loooong line for women–perhaps 100 or more women waiting, and the middle aged woman dressed as a colonial Minuteman who got in line behind me and said, “I’m going to use the men’s bathroom, “hey, I’m a nurse, I’ve seen everything.” And she did; most of the men in the bathroom–an older crowd, me included–hardly batted an eye.
It was a happy crowd, this time.
P.S.–The comparison between what kind of shape the Inauguration crowd left, vs. how our crowd left, the Capitol area and Mall are, I believe, very instructive. (see http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/clean-conservatives-filthy-liberals.html).
I have a feeling the tea party march on DC this past weekend was a lot like the March for Life held every January.
That annual march attracts hundreds of thousands of peaceful, solid citizens, many of whom arrive on Catholic parish buses. There are thousands of college students, including sizable representation from elite secular universities such as Princeton. There are families with strollers. The march stretches for miles along the route to the Supreme Court building.
This annual march is rarely covered by the MSM, and when it is the articles tend to focus on the very few participants who are holding signs with pictures of bloody fetuses (these are very few and far between, and on the last march I don’t recall seeing any “controversial” images at all. I’m always amazed at the size of the march for life, then go home and look in the newspaper for accurate coverage of the scope and tone of the event. There’s usually nothing, because that would undermine the image of pro-life marchers as members of a small lunatic fringe.
Alissa Rosenbaum’s of the world unite!!!!!!!
is it any wonder that she and i are much of the same mind?
Alissa’s early life mirrored the experience of her most devoted readers. A bright but socially awkward woman, she harbored the suspicion early on that her intellectual gifts caused classmates to shun her. She was born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg. Her Russian-Jewish family faced severe state discrimination, first for being Jewish under the czars, and then for being wealthy merchants under the Bolsheviks, who stole her family’s home and business for the alleged benefit of the people.
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Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum’s mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that “this may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ ”
Rosenbaum dreamed of fame as a novelist and a scriptwriter, and fled to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. There she adopted her new name, for reasons that remain unclear.
Rosenbaums of the world unite…
[and if your dyslexic.. Disflexics of the world untie!]
Rosenbaum’s political philosophy remained amorphous in her early years. Aside from a revulsion at communism, her primary influence was Nietzsche, whose exaltation of the superior individual spoke to her personally. She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that “he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people”; and she meant this as praise. Her political worldview began to crystallize during the New Deal, which she immediately interpreted as a straight imitation of Bolshevism. Rosenbaum threw herself into advocacy for Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, and after Wilkie’s defeat she bitterly predicted;
“a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and of firing squads.”
Her campaign work brought her into closer contact with conservative intellectuals and pro-business organizations, and helped to refine her generalized anti-communist and crudely Nietzschean worldview into a moral defense of the individual will and unrestrained capitalism.
I am going Galt…
I wish my future to be in Meliflora..
[a marxist talking]
Rand expressed her philosophy primarily through two massive novels: The Fountainhead, which appeared in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in 1957. Both tomes, each a runaway best-seller, portrayed the struggle of a brilliant and ferociously individualistic man punished for his virtues by the weak-minded masses. It was Atlas Shrugged that Rand deemed the apogee of her life’s work and the definitive statement of her philosophy. She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships–that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of “looters and moochers” stealing from society’s productive elements.
“it’s time we realize–as the Reds do–that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.”-ayn rand
i have tried to bring my work forward for years and decades. disenfranchised much like certain students today are being disenfranchised.
so i am going galt.
the mellifera call to me… 🙂
screw the rest of it all…
my parents are dying, and my son is grown
my designs are still in the draw
my artwork not perverse enough
my economics is not enough for a new child as my wife and i want
and i cant get anywhere with the technology i ahve invented and designed (in genomics, and other areas where i actually work).
now i dream of just enough to leave and to stay far enough away to fritter away in peace.
will send fashion week images tonight if i am not too tired… my last time in the tents. I will miss everything, but i cant aford to participate any more.
I live in Maine and it is a very liberal state, for many reasons. 1) maine exports its young people and talented people, leaving a degenerate welfare society which votes left. 2) maine is the home of many people who have moved there in search of the “simple life” and vote left. there are probably more reasons than these too.
The rural people who are actually from maine and have been for generations, actually tend to be more conservative. (they are also slandered as trash hicks). Unfortunately they also tend to be of the “don’t rock the boat” type.
Susan Collins represents mainly Northern Maine which is more conservative than Southern Maine. If you look at presidential elections broken down by county, you see that the sparsely populated northern counties tend to go red.
Not that this explains everything but demographics of the constituency do matter sometimes.
anna: I agree with your characterization of Maine’s electorate. But Collins is a Senator, not a House member. She represents the entire state and needs to win statewide. So it doesn’t matter which part of the state she comes from (it’s Caribou, which is certainly the north), does it? And the (liberal) south of Maine is where the population is.
that is probably true too. another thing that I have noticed which may have some meaning is that if anyone from near where I live (northern part of Maine) needs anything, they will 9 times out of 10 call Susan Collins for it and she usually pulls strings for it. I have heard of people calling Snowe for stuff too but from the reports I hear, she tends to be more distant from her constituents.
a funny story: I work with a guy who idolizes fidel castro and he said that Collins was the only Republican he had ever voted for LOL…..