Remember the press coverage of John Edwards’ $1250 haircut? The democrat candidate tells an audience of rubes and bumpkins in Iowa that it’s all part of a conspiracy by the people who make $100 million a year to silence him.

This class warfare stuff is pretty rich coming from a champion of poor who owns a 28,000 sq. foot house, and whose own personal fortune is estimated in a range from $29.5 and $62 million..

1:22 video

Via The Politico.

Jules Crittenden takes the occasion of the failure of the Gonzalez No Confidence vote, Harry Reid’s 19% Favorable Rating, and the democrat Congress’s 27% Approval Rating (a 10 Year Low) to remind Americans that it is actually possible to be doing worse than George W. Bush.

Mark Tapscott says the unpopularity of both Republicans and democrats proves it’s time for a new Party.

Hillary at Applied Materials

Palo Alto Daily News:

Clinton used the presidential campaign stop at Applied Materials in Santa Clara to unveil a nine-point “innovation agenda” to combat fear of surrounding global competition. …

The senator’s nine-point agenda focuses on spending more government funds on education and research in math, science and technology, and on using incentives to encourage companies to pursue new ideas. …

Clinton’s proposals include doubling the budgets of the national science and health foundations, increasing the number and size of innovation-oriented fellowships and starting a $50 billion “strategic energy fund” to break the cycle of energy dependence.

The senator also emphasized the need to build the infrastructure for innovation, including constructing broadband Internet works, recruiting more women and minorities to the fields of science and technology, and retaining foreign workers who graduate from U.S. universities. …

her affirmation of visas and green cards for immigrant and foreign employees brought the afternoon’s most enthusiastic applause.

Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal explains the game plan.

If there’s a smarter guy in Washington right now than Sen. Chuck Schumer, Republicans haven’t noticed. The New York Democrat is doggedly working to dismantle what’s left of the Bush presidency, with barely an ounce of pushback from the other side.

Mr. Schumer was the instigator of the Democrats’ probe into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, although note that the question of who fired which prosecutor is already yesterday’s news. The attorneys mess was just an opening, a hook that is now allowing Mr. Schumer to escalate into an assault on the wider administration, as well as presidential authority over key programs, such as wiretapping.

The ultimate goal? Surround the Bush presidency in a mist of incompetence and corruption, force Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to go, get a special prosecutor appointed to examine the many supposed misdeeds, and then sit back and ride the steady drip-drip of negative Bush headlines all the way to more Senate seats and the Oval Office.

Washington Times:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.8 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Tuesday in The Washington Times.

“He has set aside $1 billion to go for it,” a long-time business adviser to Mr. Bloomberg tells The Times. “The thinking about where it will come from and do we have it is over, and the answer is yes, we can do it.”

The $1 billion would represent about one-fifth of Mr. Bloomberg’s personal fortune.

Last Sunday, RINO Chuck Hagel was speculating on Face the Nation about sharing a ticket with Bloomberg. link

Hagel is better-known nationally, so I naturally assumed that Bloomberg was considering the VP slot on that Third Party ticket, but if Bloomberg will be ponying up a billion dollars, his plans must be the other way around.

There is clearly something about the media-saturated atmosphere of Manhattan which induces excessive vanity. Not one, but two, NYC mayors think that their local office atop a governmental dunghill of corruption, bureaucracy, and political featherbedding is likely to be regarded nationally as an appropriate stepping-stone to the presidency of the United States. They are both sadly mistaken.

But if Michael Bloomberg is sufficiently self-infatuated and frivolous enough to waste that kind of money to get into the history books somewhere south of Alf Landon, more power to him. He will really wind up playing the role of Ralph Nader in recent elections, sucking away a small percentage of the votes of airheads who would otherwise be voting for the democrat.

I do think that he ought to ask Donald Trump to be his running-mate though, instead of Chuck Hagel.

Dean Barnett, in the Weekly Standard, notes that John Kerry did himself a lot of political harm with Packer fans when he spoke of “Lambert Field.”

Barnett clearly thinks that Howard Dean should have identified Stairway to Heaven as his favorite song, instead of Jaspora, an esoteric piece of Haitian reggae by Jean Wyclif.

Imagine what a candidate could get done if he achieved fluency in pop culture. Picture a candidate who could effortlessly segue from paying homage to Dale Earnhardt’s #3 to saying how much High Noon has always meant to him. Conjure up a contender who could unashamedly admit that if owning every George Strait record makes him a square, so be it, and then quickly pivot to the many times tears welled in his eyes when sports heroes like Curt Schilling or Willis Reed rose above pain to perform in an almost super-human fashion.

That guy wouldn’t just have a lot of admirers who wanted to have a beer with him. He’d also eventually be known as Mr. President.

But Professor Bainbridge rejects the proposed Barnett test.

That’s not pop culture. That’s rural Southern culture. Nascar. The opiate of the good ol’ boy masses. Gary Cooper. A great movie, but hardly au courant. George Strait, gawd help us.

Between Clinton and Bush 43 we’ve been ruled by Southerners for the last 4 presidential terms and Barnett wants to foist yet another good ol’ boy on us. Not that there’s anything wrong with Southerners, per se, of course. But maybe it’s time to let a Yankee city boy have a chance?

Personally, if I wanted to choose a President based on his or her fluency with pop culture (which is about the dumbest criteria I’ve ever seen anyway), I’d look for somebody who:

Can effortlessly segue from paying homage to Merlot Clone #3 to saying how much The Matrix has always meant to him. Conjure up a contender who could unashamedly admit that if owning every Bruce Springsteen record makes him a left-leaning pinko, so be it, and then quickly pivot to the many times tears welled in his eyes during the second quarter of Super Bowl XLI.

And proposes the following instead:

Knows which wine to match with the foie gras-stuffed quail being served at a state dinner

Won’t wink at the Queen

Doesn’t hunt, fish, or go with girls who do

Smokes cigars

Is sometimes accused of having a metrosexual streak

Only drinks beer with foods that would score at least 10,000 on the Scoville scale

Can credibly debate the relative claims of The Matrix, Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Star Trek II to be the greatest science fiction movie of all time

Can credibly debate the relative claims of The Who and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band to be the world’s greatest rock and roll band

Came from a state that didn’t secede

Can recite at least one Monty Python skit from memory

Can credibly debate the relative claims of Blazing Saddles, The Producers, and Young Frankenstein to be Mel Brook’s best movie, while explaining why Spaceballs is a candidate for the worst movie ever

Has never sat through an entire Woody Allen movie, an entire Nascar race, or an entire Dixie Chicks concert

Wouldn’t camp out 5 days to get Garth Brooks tickets even if s/he was camping at the time

Went to Germany on vacation because s/he couldn’t find a highway with high enough speed limits in the US

Prefers football to basketball to baseball to soccer

Doesn’t play golf

Doesn’t bowl

Has no kids to foist subsequent generations of politicians on us

Has a spouse with no political ambitions

Lives with at least one golden retriever

Nebraska RINO Chuck Hagel, who has complied a record of anti-Republican votes and defeatism that Lincoln Chafee might envy, observed yesterday on Face the Nation that, in his view, the Republican Party had been hijacked away from its core values (presumably those of Liberal “Me-Too” Republicanism) by “extremists.”

In an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Hagel expansively speculated about running as a Third Party candidate, a move he predicted would be good for the American political system. Schieffer then turned the conversation to discussing prospects of a joint run with New York City’s Anti-Gun-crusading, Anti-Nicotine-Nazi Mayor Bloomberg.

Hagel was delighted by the idea, and grew misty-eyed over the generosity of the America which could offer such opportunities to some very rich and powerful “boys” from Nebraska and New York.

As John Wayne used to say: That’ll be the day.

David Broder, in today’s Washington Post, claims the left has a mandate for defeat, surrender, and withdrawal.

The gap between public opinion and Washington reality has rarely been wider than on the issue of the Iraq war. A clear national mandate is being blocked — for now — by constraints that make sense only in the short-term calculus of politics in this capital city.

The public verdict on the war is plain. Large majorities have come to believe that it was a mistake to go in, and equally large majorities want to begin the process of getting out. That is what the polls say; it is what the mail to Capitol Hill says; and it is what voters signaled when they put the Democrats back into control of Congress in November. …

The question that naturally arises is why the strongly expressed judgment of the people — responding to news of increasing American casualties in a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict — cannot be translated into action in Washington. …

One way or another, public opinion ultimately will be heeded on the war in Iraq. It is hard to imagine the Republicans going into the presidential election of 2008 with 150,000 American troops still taking heavy casualties in Iraq.

It’s true that the democrats won control of Congress last November, but many other issues and factors besides the war, and a number of Republican scandals, undoubtedly also played a role in that election’s results. The democrats gained a very narrow Congressional majority, and can hardly be described as possessing a mandate to do anything other than avoid taking bribes and molesting pages.

Which mandate alone should represent a more than adequate challenge, requiring all the moral resolve and political will the democrat party can possibly muster, if not more.

One hears the claim a lot these days that public opinion thinks this, and public opinion demands that, as if opinion polls conducted by news organizations represented some sort of meaningful, objective, binding, and official process. This sort of claim represents the grossest sort of attempt by journalists to usurp political authority.

The poll Mr. Broder cites in his own editorial was conducted by two notoriously biased news organizations, the Washington Post and ABC News. And its results are based on the responses of a mere 1082 adults, including an intentional “oversample of African-Americans.”

Opinion polls of 1000 or so of the people willing to talk to pollsters on the phone prove basically nothing. Opinion polls are typically artfully crafted. The questions they contain steer answers in the direction their creators desire.

That WaPo/ABC poll, which Broder cited, asked:

Do you think (the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties); OR, do you think (the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there)?

But if I asked instead:

Do you think (the United States should abandon the civilian population of Iraq to Islamic Fundamentalism and sectarian violence, if that means destroying our future credibility in the eyes of both our friends and our adversaries abroad): OR, do you think (the United States should keep its word and implant stable and democratic government in Iraq, even at the cost of US military casualties)?

the poll results would be quite different.

Mr. Broder’s polls never can produce anything resembling a mandate. They only represent propaganda, typically created by dishonest and dishonorable advocates.

The only opinion polls which count occur officially and in November. The last election was inconclusive, as are the war’s current results.

Members of the left and its allies in the punditocracy looking for a mandate for surrender, withdrawal, and defeat need to look for it in the results of the 2008 election, and stop claiming that they already possess it.

Staggering rises in real estate prices caused many Boston-area workers to commute long distances from Southern New Hampshire in order to be able to afford a decent house. The Southern end of the Granite state also has been afflicted with tax refugees from Massachusetts who moved to New Hampshire, but brought their liberal politics with them. And, being scenic, comparatively unspoiled, and rural, New Hampshire was unfortunate enough as to attract wealthy liberal retirees and Trustafarian bolsheviks yearning to hug some trees.

David Shribman warns that the impact of the invasion of flatlanders into New Hampshire has alarming national ramifications.

New Hampshire, which voted for Richard Nixon on a national ticket five times and went for George W. Bush in 2000, might be regarded as the elusive last blue piece in the northeastern section of the political jigsaw puzzle. …

How does all this affect the national political scene?

The short answer can be rendered in the two-word way you might have expected from Calvin Coolidge, who was from Vermont but whose taciturn style was strictly northern New England: a lot.

It means that here in New Hampshire, where you are now more likely to get a handmade latte in a coffeehouse than a homemade slice of apple pie in a diner, the governing assumptions of Democratic primary voters next January will be that the war in Iraq is a travesty, that the Bush tax cuts should be repealed, that the respect New Hampshire voters have always given to solemn national institutions like the presidency is a thing of the past (expect a fusillade of anti-Bush ads in the coming months, no holds barred), and that the wage and wealth gap between rich and poor will be a point of departure for debate and not a point of debate itself. The voters have made New Hampshire safe for Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.

But not only safe. New Hampshire, which lured Michael Dukakis and many of his campaigning colleagues over the years ever so slightly to the right, now will nudge Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards to the left. This will not be hard to do, given their natural inclinations. …

New Hampshire has lost its distinction, which is a cultural shame and a national problem.

The cultural shame is that the state, once protected from foolishness by the White Mountains (and, farther south, by a lingering sense of remoteness), is more like the rest of the country than it used to be, which by any definition cannot be good. The national problem, for the Democrats this time, may be that New Hampshire won’t offer a cautionary brake for the party and its potential nominee. …

The result may very well be that the nomination process will be more warped than usual. This time the entire universe of voters in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary may be more motivated, more passionate and more liberal than ever. All politics may be local, but in New Hampshire, all local politics are national.

John McCain has been making serious movements in a rightward direction recently, speaking out against gun control, urging America to stay the course in Iraq. (You might almost think he was running for president, or something.)

This little vignette at the Murrells Inlet, South Carolina VFW Hall was downright endearing. The moonbats were wetting their beds over at Daily Kos over it: Splash1, Splash2, Splash3.

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That Kos-linked video is being flooded with attention, and isn’t loading in a timely fashion. Here’s the same thing at an alternative link.

Here’s the complete version (on a leftwing site, but I enjoyed it anyway).

Arianna Huffington has an interesting, and oh, so valid criticism of all of the contenders for the democrat party nomination.

There is a major disconnect in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the top candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed War on Drugs, a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: according to a 2006 ACLU report, African Americans make up 15 percent of drug users, but account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: America has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70 percent) are black or Latino.

Such facts and figures have been bandied about for years. But what to do about the legion of nonviolent — predominantly minority — drug offenders has long been an electrified third-rail in American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by our political leaders, who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Supporting ending Prohibition did not win Al Smith the election in 1928, but Smith’s politics certainly played a key role in the national political realignment which swept FDR into power and gave the democrat party political dominance from 1932 to 1966.

I think Arianna is on to something.

Your inner rebel: Brando in The Wild One (1953)

Matt Lewis says it’s time for us Republican conservatives to stop thinking about those safe, liberal 2008 choices, and start supporting someone in our hearts we know is right.

In life, there are times to make a safe choice. Should you go to the gym in the morning or pour yourself a bowl of Miller Lite Cheerios? Should you take the car rental insurance or chance it? Decisions, decisions.

Similarly tough choices inevitably seep into our politics. For Republican voters, it has been: Should you vote for Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan, or go with the Republican standard-bearer? (You probably made the “adult” decision, sucked it up and punched your ticket for George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, even if they were squishy Republicans who were dull as can be.)

For 2008, the safe thing means backing one of the “big three” Republicans, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Here’s the problem with always doing the safe thing: Voting is supposed to be a bit rebellious. There are times to throw caution to the wind and go for what you really want. (This often happens after a few drinks.) Depending on your lifestyle, that might include buying a motorcycle, following the Grateful Dead, getting a tattoo or just ordering another helping of that sinfully rich chocolate cake.

Read the whole thing.

He won’t get an argument from me.