This Dallas Morning News story demonstrates that Hispanic voters are a natural GOP constituency.

A bent to conservatism and family makes Hispanics a promising pool of votes for Republicans, but the party’s targeting of illegal immigrants has withered its attraction.

Regardless, Gov. Rick Perry has fared relatively well, perhaps because of his anti-Washington rhetoric and his careful immigration stance, a recent poll indicates.

It shows more than half of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservative, and a surprising 23 percent say they might participate in Tuesday’s GOP primary.

Emphasizing punishing illegal aliens, trafficking in slurs associating immigration with welfare and emergency room medical care, noisy advocacy of border closing and rigid enforcement of impractical and inflexible immigration regulations are popular vices of conservatives expressive of unattractive emotional impulses and representative of unsound political reasoning.

America is currently still in the process of receiving a major wave of largely Hispanic immigration arriving here to meet domestic labor needs which would be otherwise unfilled. We are again in a period of history in which our respectable native born laboring class has moved up and out. The residuum of unskilled native residents have attitudes, expectations, and alternative options making hard work at low pay unattractive to them. Yet the country’s labor needs to be done, and needs to be done affordably.

We should be congratulating ourselves that the people volunteering are Hispanic Catholics, generally hard-working, of conservative disposition, and possessing strong family values. In Europe, the same kind of immigration wave is made up of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East.

Cato Institute scholars demolish Obama’s State of the Union message point by point.

9:38 video

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An amusing alternative commentary may be found in HuffPo‘s State of the Union drinking game.

Entire speech 1:09:20 video

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

J. Robert Smith, at American Thinker, is feeling very optimistic. He quips that the health care reform bill is as dead as the Articles of Confederation and predicts that internal democrat party conflicts will move to the forefront of Washington’s agenda as moderate democrats begin making defensive moves attempting to survive politically and the democrat party’s leftist base proceeds to twist arms and punish defectors.

In the coming weeks and months, the best political spectator sport around might not be Democrats versus Republicans or conservatives versus liberals, but Democrats of all stripes turning on one another.

Other than demagoguery, what Democrats are most accomplished at is fratricide (think back to the ’60s and ’70s). In the wake of Scott Brown’s hosing of Martha Coakley, the Democrats are about to have a good old-fashioned civil war. Pity for them; bully for America.

The Democrats are dividing roughly along these lines: left ideologues against pols, the latter being those congressional Democrats who like their jobs and don’t intend to wrap themselves in the European Union flag and jump off a craggy cliff into the Potomac.

It’s Pelosi and Frank and their ilk versus Heath Shuler and his ilk. But given Tuesday night’s win for Scott Brown in deep blue Massachusetts, it may be more than self-styled Democratic moderates who choose to defect. A few liberals may join in, too.

President Obama is showing every sign of being a cliff-jumper. Word out of the White House is that he plans to go on a populist offensive. In other words, he aims to demagogue anyone and anything in an attempt to divert voters’ attention from his utterly woeful, ideologically blind performance to date. And did I mention that under the cover of a hate, resentment, and envy campaign, Mr. Obama and his chief congressional lieutenants, the envenomed Nancy Pelosi and the passive-aggressive Harry Reid, will still scheme to foist statism on America?

While the President’s bravado may warm the hearts of Huffington Post and Daily Kos denizens, and while he may win plaudits from the Davids (Broder, Gergen, and Brooks) and the New York Times (among other liberal mouthpieces) for his supposed shrewdness, plenty of work-a-day congressional Democrats aren’t going to enlist in a lemmings’ march into the sea.

Self-preservation is a powerful instinct. The Coakley upending is the fork in the road for Democrats who are more enamored of themselves than stinky left-wing orthodoxy. The marker at the road’s fork points right, toward the middle ground. It’s where these Democrats know they must go if they are to stand a prayer of retaining their seats in November.

With every passing day, expect a few, and then lots of sobered Democrats to take the road right, regardless of the sharp disapproval of Pelosi and Reid or the threats of the White House Capone crew.

Congressional members peeling away from their party’s failing president is nothing new in Washington annals. LBJ and Richard Nixon could have given you earfuls.

But left-wing activists and fundraisers and money-givers aren’t going to take defections lightly. While keeping guns trained on Mr. Obama to ensure his fealty, expect left-wingers to turn other guns on congressional Democrats cheeky enough to scuttle ideology in favor of survival.

Nowadays, the left isn’t so much a movement as it is a death pact. If you’ve taken its money or accepted its campaign ground troops or benefited from its uncoordinated expenditures — and most Democrats have — then you’re on the hook. It’s like the mafia: Once you’re made, you can’t be unmade. Woe to the good fella or gal who wishes to part company. …

If the Democrats’ civil war plays out as expected, the result will be legislative torpor, magnificent wheels-squealing, and grinding-to-a-halt gridlock for 2010. Much to the relief of taxpayers and Main Street Americans, the 111th Congress will do no more damage…because it can’t.

In 1972, reacting to the landslide victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern, film critic Pauline Kael renownedly protested: “How can that be? No one I know voted for Nixon!”

Megan McArdle offers some timely advice to dumbfounded members of the community of fashion on how to deal with defeat.

In 2004, the day after George Bush was re-elected, New York was a sullen place. At lunch, I sat next to one of my favorite New York liberals in brooding silence for a while, and then her sadness and rage suddenly erupted.

“I just didn’t realize,” she said, “that America hated me.”

What do you say to that? America didn’t hate her; America didn’t know her. America mostly wasn’t thinking about her. Yes, I’ve no doubt that the more tribal political partisans were cackling at the thought of grieving New York liberals (and in 2006, their liberal counterparts were prowling the internet for pleasurable nuggets of schadenfreude–no, don’t deny it, I physically watched them do it.) But most people hadn’t been thinking about my companion when they voted. They’d been thinking about themselves. They’d been trying to do, in their own hamfisted and probably ignorant way, the best thing for themselves and their country.

I’ve got a fine sense of deja vu after reading this on Andrew’s page:

I simply cannot grasp what motivates these people, what compels them to thwart even the smallest attempts to clean up the enormous destruction they wrought under Bush and Cheney. Irresponsible, hateful, mendacious, sleazy, destructive – these words do not even begin to describe them.

Saying that you “cannot grasp” what motivates others is supposed to indicate their utter moral turpitude, I suppose. And in the case of say, people who rape children, yes, it’s true: I cannot grasp it. Can’t imagine. Don’t want to.

But when you’re using it as a dodge to avoid grappling with the opinion of well over half your fellow countrymen, this won’t do. Being unable to imagine what the majority of Americans might be thinking doesn’t indicate a problem with them. It suggests you kind of need to get out more. Ask around. If there’s one thing any American is always happy to share, it’s his opinion.

But for the shut-ins, and those who are too busy with their needlepoint, I have a useful little shortcut that you can use to try and understand why this vast, pulsating blob of undifferentiated evildoers might be opposing the Democrats’ health care agenda: they think it’s a bad idea.

That’s not so hard to imagine, is it? You have had ideas, and you have opposed the bad ideas of others. You have experience in the domain, so to speak. Think of it as sort of a visualization device.

The next time you are trying to imagine why the people who disagree with you are actively promoting the destruction of all that is good in the universe, grab a soothing cup of mint tea, put your feet up on a comfy pillow, and then close your eyes and imagine what those people would look like campaigning against something that is a very bad idea. 99 times out of a hundred, you’ll find that they look . . . well, exactly like they look when they’re campaigning against your idea. And suddenly the whole thing is no longer so inexplicable, isn’t it?

I mean, we all know that that’s ridiculous, because you have never in your life been wrong about any major question, or had a bad idea of your own, which is why you are so fabulously wealthy and married to the first person you ever dated, who is even now smiling at you in blissful perfection from the arms of your four flawless children. But they don’t know that, you see. As I think I’ve mentioned, they haven’t met you. They won’t know anything about you until you finally accept that Nobel Peace Prize. So you’ll have to content yourself with understanding that while you, personally, may never be in error, other well meaning people sometimes are. And then still other well-meaning people have to get up off the sofa and point this out, lest they lead the entire nation astray.

This does not require arguing that the people who oppose you are right. Obviously, if you thought that, they wouldn’t be opposing you. It just requires a little more empathy, a little less tribalism.

The LA Times observes that the Massachusetts special election represented a shot by the voters fired directly across the democrat party’s bows. If they do not change direction rapidly, they are going to pay.

[E]ven as Massachusetts voters streamed to the polls to anoint Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s successor, Democratic leaders showed no signs of standing down.

“We’re right on course,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said after meeting with her leadership team. “We will have a healthcare reform bill, and it will be soon.”

For Democrats facing tough reelection fights in swing districts this November, however, the spectacle of their party losing in a liberal bastion has been chilling.

Even before Tuesday, party leaders had been under pressure to pivot toward other issues high on the agenda of an angry and impatient electorate: job creation and fiscal responsibility.

“It is really time now,” said Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), “for Democrats to shift their attention to issues that will enjoy broad public support.”

Most worrisome for the party is polling data that indicates Obama’s healthcare bill has helped turn independent voters — who fueled his presidential campaign to victory — into antagonists.

“If the Democrats can’t win in a state they carried by 26 points in 2008, then they have to ask themselves: Where in the world is it safe to be a Democrat running for federal office in 2010?” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm worked with the Brown campaign. “The answer is nowhere.”

Martha Coakley’s increasingly desperate negative campaign ads are provoking satire. This example is from Boston radio 96.9 WTKK. 0:52 video.

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The Left is getting seriously worried about what will happen on Tuesday in Massachsetts.

Josh Marshall writes:

If Scott Brown wins on Tuesday, you can bet he’ll arrive in DC the next morning waiting to be sworn in. And there’s just not much precedent for any real delay of swearing in the winner of a special election, as long as the election result is not in dispute. (Oddly, there haven’t been that many Senate special elections — as opposed to appointments until the end of a given senate. So we’re actually trying to figure out now what precedent would apply.) At that point, Health Care Reform will be dead unless the House agrees to pass the Senate bill verbatim — which I really wonder about, given how dug in the progressives in the House are. Barney Frank doesn’t seem to think it’ll happen.

At that point, how incredibly stupid is the dawdling over the last few weeks going to look? The work of a year, arguably the work of a few generations, let go needlessly over a single special election?

It’s really almost beyond comprehension.

Late Update: TPM Reader VL responds …

Not only that, but how cruel – not only for us here in MA but for the whole country – for it to be Kennedy’s seat itself that kills health care, the cause of his life.

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IPPC 2007: Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Himalayan Glaciers not vanishing. No science was ever behind IPCC report‘s assertion that they were. How embarrassing! London Times.

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Lucianne describes last minute democrat health care desperation: Like trying to put an oyster into a slot machine, Nelson tries to give back his bribe. Associated news agency story.

The New York Times describes the desperate efforts of White House courtiers and advisors to prevent full-scale revolt. They failed.

In the great health care debate of 2009, President Obama has cast himself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, willing to compromise in exchange for votes. Now ideology — an uprising on the Democratic left — is smacking the pragmatic president in the face.

Stung by the intense White House effort to court the votes of moderate holdouts like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, liberals are signaling that they have compromised enough. Grass-roots groups are balking, liberal commentators are becoming more critical of the president, some unions are threatening to withhold support and Howard Dean, the former Democratic Party chief, is urging the Senate to kill its health bill.

The White House scrambled Thursday to tamp down the revolt, which has been simmering for weeks but boiled over when the Senate Democratic leadership, bowing to Mr. Lieberman, scrapped language allowing people as young as 55 to buy into Medicare.

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Pass this “heinous mandate” at your peril, Senators, warns Keith Olbermann.

1:36 video

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The Kos says remove the mandate or kill the billl.

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In the New Republic, Ed Kilgore warns that Barack Obama has achieved the perfect political storm, a tactical convergence between the left and the right in opposition to his policies.

(O)n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

Bill Siegel contends that Americans by 2012 are likely to have had it right up to here with Barack Obama’s smooth, cool, and artfully glib insincerity. He could very well be right, and it seems to me that when he talks about the stylistic and substantive opposite of Obama, he’s really talking about Dick Cheney.

Obama, the proficient law student and law lecturer, is well trained in “issue spotting” – being able to articulate both sides of an issue. Perhaps his most effective public manipulation lies in his ability to briefly state something worth recognizing on the other side of an issue, thus convincing the audience that because he can see the complexity of our problems he must know the best solution.

Obama will frequently answer a tough question by saying “on the one hand we want X, while on the other we certainly must be concerned with Y.” He will avoid a clear answer, inviting the audience to trust to him on the presumption that, because he could mention something of value to both sides, he must be best suited to work out the optimal compromise. The liberal media fell completely for this simple and cheap trick. Meanwhile, Obama, the hustler, never intended to solve any problem with any solution other than one from the far left. …

He has been the consummate salesman, or “flim-flam man,” coming into town ready to sell whatever the audience will accept, only to later figure a way to weasel his way out of living up to his word. After awhile, those who look at him with open eyes bounce between fear to panic and back as they realize the country has elected a leader who, along with his close staff, is willing to sacrifice the most fundamental priorities of the nation with the most shocking cold-heartedness. His complete lack of “real” emotion, covered up by a false, almost Las Vegas “Rat Pack” veneer, has recently become apparent to more and more of the nation.

Finally, “change” has been Obama’s calling card. And, as with any hypnotic induction, vagueness can powerfully bind many a subject when left to the mind of the listener to clarify. Nevertheless, many Obama supporters are beginning to realize that the “change” he or she imagined the president to have suggested is different from the almost complete overhaul of our national fabric that Obama and his minions have been pounding out. As more of the country discovers this, they are becoming less interested in a radical and massive transformation of the country and more interested in simple “baby step” improvements while maintaining the integrity of our system.

All of this leads one to consider whether what is truly needed to beat Obama is to have someone who doesn’t resemble him. Perhaps what will emerge for Republicans is not a charismatic, dream-laden salesman who knows how to wow audiences, handle Oprah, and romance NBC “news” personalities, but rather someone who is simple and, perhaps, not very good looking or stylish at all.

Perhaps they should choose someone not looking to be on Mt. Rushmore before he can ease the economy and address the true faults in our health care system while not destroying it. Perhaps someone who doesn’t claim to be open and transparent while keeping under wraps critical aspects of his past; one whose past is easily understandable and relatable. One who, to his core, is American, from America, and, most importantly, loves America. One who is strong enough to fight for America, show he is prepared to fight, believe in its exceptionalism, and no longer apologize for any so-called “harms” upon which the world’s numerous “victim” groups have cast their identities. One who sees clearly the dangers of “radical” Islam and has tired of pretending it is anything other than what it says and does. And one who tells the truth and loves the truth.

Read the whole thing.

Harry Reid paid 20x the price that Thomas Jefferson paid for the entire Louisiana Territory for Mary Landrieu’s vote yesterday.

Byron York explains that getting the votes to bring ObamaCare to the floor for debate was, comparatively speaking, the easy part, and the democrat leadership barely succeeded.

(J)udging by the statements of four moderate Democrats — Lieberman, Lincoln, Landrieu, and Nelson — it will be far, far harder when the process comes to the really important vote, the one that would bring debate to a close and move on to an up-or-down vote on the Democrats’ health care plan. On Saturday, all four of those Democrats publicly threatened to side with Republicans and kill the bill before it can move to a final vote, unless their concerns are met.

“If the bill remains where it is now, I will not be able to support a cloture motion before final passage,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman said. “I’m prepared to vote against moving to the next stage of consideration as long as a government-run public option is included,” said Sen. Blanche Lincoln. “My vote to move forward on this important debate should in no way be construed by the supporters of this current framework as an indication of how I might vote as this debate comes to an end,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu. And Sen. Ben Nelson said he will “oppose the second cloture motion — needing 60 votes — to end debate, and oppose the final bill” if major changes are not made.

Some of that is the normal positioning and bargaining that takes place when big bills are considered. But the Democrats’ problems in keeping their side together, in the face of united Republican opposition, are an indicator of how public opinion is beginning to dominate the health care debate. Dozens of polls show that Americans are deeply divided over the issue, with a slight plurality opposing the Democratic health care plans currently under consideration in Congress. Clear majorities of Americans don’t believe their health care will improve under the plan, and do believe the plan will increase the deficit. Given that, Democrats are trying to pass the biggest piece of legislation in decades, one that will create an enormous and permanent new entitlement, with less than majority support among the public. And they’re racing to do it with less than a year to go before mid-term elections that most observers believe will result in fewer Democrats in Congress. No wonder it’s hard.

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Shameless giveaways of tax dollars were needed to get this far. All of Washington is laughing about how much it cost to buy Senator Mary Landieu’s vote, Dana Milbank has details.

Staffers on Capitol Hill were calling it the Louisiana Purchase.

On the eve of Saturday’s showdown in the Senate over health-care reform, Democratic leaders still hadn’t secured the support of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 60 votes needed to keep the legislation alive. The wavering lawmaker was offered a sweetener: at least $100 million in extra federal money for her home state.

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote — and to trumpet the financial “fix” she had arranged for Louisiana. “I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.”

It was an awkward moment (not least because her figure is 20 times the original Louisiana Purchase price).

Rep. Paul Ryan ( R — 1 WI), in his 2 minute House speech captured in this 1:53 video, correctly observes that the democrat’s health care bill is not about reforming the system or lowering costs. It’s about ideology.

What side of history do democrats want to be on? Not the side of Washington and Jefferson.

John Cassidy, in the New Yorker, identifies whose side they are on.

In extending our health-care system, all we are doing is catching up with Otto Von Bismarck’s Germany, which recognized a hundred and twenty-five years ago that universal health and disability coverage, along with old age pensions and a system of public education, were essential elements of a modern society.

Otto von Bismarck

Der Staatssozialismus paukt sich durch. (State Socialism will forcibly move forward.)
— Otto von Bismark.

Democrats want to replace the Liberal American ideals of limited government, personal freedom, and individual responsibility with Mitteleuropean statism, socialism, and collectivism. Their “modern society” is, just like Bismark’s, centralized, bureaucratized, and dirigiste.

Socialism, statism, collectivism are all actually terribly old-fashioned ideas, representing nothing other than a variety of negative responses to the Liberal Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and the restraint of state power in favor of voluntary and organic order. The would-be rulers of mankind simply ceased appealing to claims of Divine Right and hereditary superiority and began attempting to gain power by flattering and bribing the masses, while arousing their passions with fraudulent claims of injury and entitlement.

Human appetite for power is unlimited and the possession of power is always addictive. The Central European monarchies, Germany, Austria, Russia, which pioneered centralizing statism with unprecedentedly expansive regimes of taxation, regulation, and conscription, inevitably turned their power against one another, and destroyed themselves with the war they launched in 1914.

From its grand dynastic monarchies, the tradition of Continental European collectivism passed in 1917 to populist rule by cafe intellectuals, bringing within a generation an even greater war and murderous barbarism producing atrocities and deaths on a scale unprecedented in European civilization.

European exhaustion and the demoralization of the traditional leadership classes, after WWII, produced generally more benign socialist rule, but the European welfare state politics American liberals yearn to share produced nothing but European stagnation and decline. Britain was still rationing food as it had in wartime in 1954.

America surged dramatically ahead of Europe, economically and culturally, and (until the late 1960s) enjoyed decidedly less divisive and destructive politics.

Europe only began catching up to the United States in material prosperity, after many long years, when deference to market considerations on the basis of the American example significantly began to influence European economic policies.

Yet, despite the manifest superiority of the American political tradition and the American ideals of Liberty and Individualism, our domestic community of fashion continues to yearn to replace those with European-style statism. They seem to feel instinctively that, because French cheese, German cars, and Scandinavian design are such effective markers of class superiority that Europeans must also possess a more chic and desirable kind of politics. They are dead wrong.

Our liberals are like the Bourbons, and the Fall of Communism (whose anniversary, with respect to the opening of the Berlin Wall, we begin to celebrate tomorrow) is like the French Revolution, a historical watershed producing some definitive judgments on the Past. Like the Bourbons, American liberals have learned nothing about economics. And like the Bourbons, they refuse to relinquish their illusions and their ancient animosities.

David Brooks, too, observes that the willingness of democrats to try for radical change at the risk of the economy is costing them the support of the non-ideological center.

Independents turned on the Republican Party because the MSM persuaded them that it was George W. Bush’s intransigent extremism which had poisoned American political life and produced bitter factionalism, and that it was Bush’s war spending and Republican banking deregulation that produced the economic crisis. They put democrats in charge, and our politics has not become bipartisan, the Middle East is not at peace, and the economy has not recovered. On the other hand, the deficit has quadrupled, the government owns General Motors, and Congress is trying to nationalize another one sixth of the economy while adding another trillion dollar entitlement, just before it proceeds to start working on carbon taxes.

Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. In Pennsylvania, there was an eight-point swing away from the Democrats among independents from a year ago. In New Jersey, there was a 12-point swing. In Virginia, there was a 13-point swing.

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.

Middle-class suburban voters who have been trending Democratic for a decade suddenly lurched out of the Democratic camp — and are now in play.

Why? What do these voters want?

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

The second thing to say is that in this time of need, these voters are not turning to government for support. Trust in government is at its lowest level in recent memory. Over the past year, there has been a shift to the right on issue after issue. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

According to that same survey, only 31 percent of Americans believe that the president and Congress “should worry more about boosting the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits.” Sixty-two percent, twice as many, believe the president and Congress “should worry more about keeping the deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.”

These shifts have not occurred because conservatives and liberals have changed their minds. They haven’t. The shift is among independents.

According to Gallup, the share of independents who describe their views as conservative has moved from 29 percent last year to 35 percent today. The share of independents who believe there is too much government regulation of business has jumped from 38 percent to 50 percent. Independents are in the position of a person who is feeling gravely ill at the same time he has lost faith in his doctor. …

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

Photographed in Prince William County

Via the Politico.