Is CA-36 up for Grabs? Follow Robert Stacy McCain's Coverage of CA-36

By the Left Coast Rebel

This morning (Saturday) is the first time I have been able to sit down and check out the blogosphere....I'm behind on a lot of things, like the details and updates in California's 36 Congressional district race.

Robert Stacy McCain called me on Thursday and I promised to give him a big hat-tip and put my Google-search-engine-stamp on the salacious CA-36 story.

Here's the lede (the meat and potatoes) of the story, from Stacy, last month:

Janice Hahn is the Democrat running for Congress in the July 12 special election in California’s 36th District, to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Jane Harman.

As a member of the Los Angeles City Council, Hahn promoted a program to use taxpayer money to hire convicted criminals as “gang intervention specialists.” Predictably, Hahn’s government employment program for gangsters amounted to a taxpayer subsidy for violent crime.

A potential California liberal congress-critter (I know, that's redundant) that hired convicts? Sounds juicy indeed. It doesn't stop there, though. Stacy has followed with several updates from mid to late June:

• June 22: Ladd’s Ad Gets Results
• June 21: Conservative PAC Asks Law Enforcement to Investigate DOS Attack on Web Site
• June 16: CA-36: The Facts of the Case
• June 15: CA-36: Hahn’s Bad Rap?
• June 15: CA-36: Anti-Hahn Video Draws More Than 75,000 Viewers in First 18 Hours
• June 14: BREAKING: Democrats Call on GOP Candidate to Denounce PAC Video

Are you up to speed?

The plot thickens, keep your focus, this is crazy stuff.

Apparently this Democrat -- Janice Hahn -- was not happy with a particular L.A. news station coverage of her involvement in the convicts-for-hire program. Hahn's lawyers issued a cease and desist order against the station! Again, Stacy writes:

When Janice Hahn’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to KTTV Fox 11 — trying to stop the Los Angeles station from following up on its 2008 investigation of Hahn’s controversial “gang intervention” progam — they probably didn’t expect this. “Large mistake, madame,” says the award-winning Ace of Spades. Because KTTV and Chris Blatchford not only stood by their original coverage, they followed up with an in-depth eight-minute report that devastates Hahn’s credibility.

Here's the video from KTTV that Stacy eludes to:

Whiskey, tango, foxtrot! Hahn is facing her Republican candidate, Craig Huey on Tuesday. Does this lunacy mean that a G.O.P'er actually has a shot at a congressional seat here in the People's Republic of Kalifornia?

Stranger things have happened, like pigs flying and cows jumping over the moon...so we can all cross our fingers for next week's results. A Huey victory would be a pleasant palate cleanser after the November, 2010 Democrat rout here in California.

Follow The Other McCain's coverage of CA-36 here.

Only One Thing Will Save America...

...SOAK THE JOB CREATORS!

I found this ad over at Power Line, a decidedly right-of-center blog. Somebody's wasting some advertising resources.

Obama's Twitter Town Hall: It's The Money, Stupid

Hat tip

Obama had a town hall meeting on Twitter, and the data are in: it's still about the money, stupid. Jobs, debt and taxes. The dark blue mountains represent the tweets (per minute) about taxes, the red ones represent the tweets about jobs, and the light blue mountains correspond with tweets about debt.

The tiny purple molehills? Tweets about Bush. The professional leftists can't let W go, but the overwhelming majority of Americans are living in 2011.

It's your economy and your big mess now, Obama. You inherited nothing. You volunteered for this job.

The spotlight is on you. The clock is ticking.

UPDATE: Tweets Obama conveniently ignored...

johnboehner: After embarking on a record spending binge that’s left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?

thehermancain: As a mathematician, I've got to ask: exactly how did you come up with the jobs "created or saved" number...?

nikkihaley: Why is your administration supporting the NLRB’s job killing policies in South Carolina?

heritage: You said your stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 8%. Do you agree that was a trillion dollars wasted?

jimgeraghty: Under 8 years of George W. Bush, the unemployment rate was never above 7.3%. When will it be that low again?

reptomprice: How can the WH reconcile the fact that the trillion dollar stimulus package failed and still push for more stimulus spending?

kerrypicket: Why should the U.S. citizens work til we're elderly to bail out Greece so their citizens can retire by age 55 with full benefits?

iowahawkblog: When you create jobs, why do always create them for Texas?

repreneeellmers: When will you put forward policies to promote job creation, not government growth?

joetaxpayer: How can you justifying sending your children to private school after working to end the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program?

iowahawkblog: Are you smart enough to create a problem so big that even you could not solve it?

huffposthill: Who is John Galt?

ben_howe: Have you fired the guy that suggested this twitter town hall yet?

Questions from Obama's useful useless idiots:

thedailybeast: A question from our Facebook fans: Mr. President, Have you gone too far in trying to compromise with Republicans?

thebrinos: Why is B Manning, who exposed war crimes, in jail while you awarded R Gates, who presided over war crimes, a Medal of Freedom?

aclu: What is your administration going to do to stem the tide of discriminatory, anti-immigrant laws coming out of state legislatures?

aflcio: Where are the jobs?

Why The Left's Global Warming Agenda Is Wrong

A persuasive video:

Hat tip: Unlikely Hospitalist at Pundit Press

What you missed...

While you were enjoying your weekend...

• Ronald Reagan Statue Unveiled in Britain on Independence Day

• Ohio Repeals its Estate Tax

• Obama’s Economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per Job

• Cisco Poised to Help China Watch Citizens

• How the Dutch Gaza Flotilla Backfired Politically

• Global Warming Debunked, AMA Hardest Hit

• Five Moral Arguments Against the DREAM Act

• Michelle Obama’s Vacation Cost Taxpayers Over $500,000 (via FAM)

Three things you can do for liberty

Photomosaic, original image here

Via Political Clown Parade:

While Independence Day is about independence from Great Britain, today it's also associated with more general notions of freedom -- individual independence, not just political independence.

Unfortunately, America's political class doesn't want you independent. It wants you as dependent as possible. As the Rainmakers sang back in the 1980s, "They'll turn us all into beggars 'cause they're easier to please."

So what can you do? Everybody focuses on the 2012 elections, and those are important. But why wait? Here are three things you can do now.

Read the rest...

Geller, The EBL et al...

Robert Stacy McCain draws our attention to a broiling controversy:

Disagreements about foreign policy are one thing. Jew-hating is something else. When someone says, “Zionists not welcome,” watch out.

Da Tech Guy informs us that some unpleasantness has developed among counter-jihad bloggers...

More here.

Does This Look Right?

From the NYT.

The relative sizes of the circles apparently represent name recognition. Vertical axis: insider vs. outsider. Horizontal axis: liberal vs. conservative (big government vs. small government).

Left to Ginsburg: Croak now or get out of the way!

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been a reliable activist for left-wing extremism on the Supreme Court ever since she was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993.

But Ruth is now old and frail (78, cancer survivor), and her fans on the left are getting worried. They might or might not be concerned about Ruth's personal well-being per se, but if she lives just a bit too long, things certainly could get ugly for the left. Here's a look at what's at what could happen in the near future, from the left-wing perspective:

• Best case scenario: Ginsburg retires now and Obama replaces her with a younger liberal → Cool, no worries!
• Almost as good: Ginsburg dies soon and Obama replaces her with a younger liberal → So sad… but cool, no worries!
• An acceptable but stressful scenario: Ginsburg refuses to respond to pressure from her left-wing comrades and she stays on the Supreme Court. However, detached from reality, Americans reelect Obama in 2012 → Liberals heave a collective sigh of relief and continue to pressure Ruth to retire (or hope for her to expire) before the end of Obama's second term.
• Massive headaches: Obama's 2012 prospects darken, but Ginsburg steadfastly refuses to retire → Liberals pray to Anubis for a timely journey to the afterlife.
• Doomsday scenario: Ginsburg stays on the Court, Obama loses in 2012, then Ginsburg dies or retires before 2016. A Republican appoints a conservative to replace Ginsburg. The world as we know it ends a few months later.

To be fair, we shouldn't assume that leftists want Ruth to die soon. They simply don't want the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court to be changed by the will of the voters in 2012. If Ruth "selfishly" decides to stay on the Supreme Court, she's a ticking time bomb for the left.

Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, the New York Times has now started the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Death Watch™:

Democrats and liberals have a nightmare vision of the Supreme Court's future: President Barack Obama is defeated for re-election next year and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 78 the oldest justice, soon finds her health will not allow her to continue on the bench.

The new Republican president appoints Ginsburg's successor, cementing conservative domination of the court...

Whatever you choose to do with your days on this earth, don't put the left-wing statist agenda in jeopardy with your very heartbeat:

There are few more indelicate questions to put to a Supreme Court justice, but Ginsburg has said gracefully, and with apparent good humor, that the president should not expect a retirement letter before 2015.

Indelicate indeed. Leftists respond to Ginsburg's plans with their ghastly and ruthless pragmatism:

...some on the left say that the focus on the personal is misplaced. Ginsburg needs to put self-interest aside and act for the good of the issues they believe in, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote recently. Kennedy said 72-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer should leave, too.

For good measure, left wing activists accuse Ginsburg of harboring a "narcissistic attitude" for wanting to keep her job:

David Garrow, a Cambridge University historian who follows the court, said Ginsburg's situation points to an institutional problem for the court, "the arguably narcissistic attitude that longer is better."

The longest-serving justice, William Douglas, was on the court for more than 36 1/2 years, reluctant to retire even after a debilitating stroke. "History teaches us that often longer is not better," Garrow said.

Translation: "Don't be an idiot, Ruth. Pay attention to history and get out of the way!"

The pressure is ON.

UPDATE: Welcome aboard, TOM readers!

Who are you, Mitt Romney?

Hat tip to Poor Richard's News for this one: