No matter what you think of J.D. Hayworth — former Congressman, talk-show host, anti-illegal immigration hardliner and Abramoff-scarred beneficiary — one thing you’ve got to like about him is that he is mounting a primary challenge to Sen. John McCain (R, Media) in Arizona.

That would be the head RINO-in-chief and First Amendment enemy — RIP, McCain/Feingold! — who threw the election to Barack Obama in 2008 by taking everything that was interesting and/or objectionable about the former Barry Soetoro — his past, his associates, even his name — off the table and thus gave himself exactly zero chance to win. Contrary to the lefty media spin that Sarah Palin cost McCain the election, she was the only thing that stood between him and an historic, McGovern/Mondale-style wipeout.

It was as if he wanted to lose, or something.

In an electoral season that’s already shaping up to be a graveyard for incumbents — so long Evan Bayh! — will McCain be the next to go?

Or, in the return of a nightmare scenario for Republicans, will he finally cross the aisle one last time, rejoin his former buddies in the media, and give the Democrats back their 60-vote majority?  (Hey — stranger things have happened.)

What do you think?

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent zip codes. Our unemployment rate went up dramatically.

But why is Obama so upset about the decision? He’s upset by unions and special interests donating large sums of money to candidates? This is the president who took $60 million from SEIU members and was visited by its head, Andy Stern, more than any other person last year. Obama’s “outrage” deserves a closer look. (more…)

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was notable for many reasons.  First, it is not often that you hear such petulance from a sitting president of the United States – complaining about not receiving applause from your political opponents is simply ridiculous.  Second, it is not often that a president directly lectures the American people – it failed when Jimmy Carter tried it in his infamous “malaise” speech, and it failed last night when President Obama told us that we needed to man up and follow him to glory.  Comparing his agenda’s stall to Bull Run, Omaha Beach, Black Tuesday and Bloody Sunday, and calling on Americans to “again … answer history’s call” is foolish and self-aggrandizing.

What’s worse is telling us that he is the spiritual embodiment of our collective strength:

And what keeps me going – what keeps me fighting – is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism – that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people – lives on.”  I couldn’t help but shake my head in amusement when he told us that “It lives on in the struggling small business owner … it lives on in the woman … it lives on in the 8-year-old boy in Louisiana … it lives on in all the Americans … [it] lives on in you, its people.

Quoting the Broadway version of The Lion King is not profundity.  It is silliness: (more…)

Still trying to sort out the implications of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision this week?

Puzzled by President Obama’s threat of a “forceful response”?  Wondering what sort of legislative remedies against the First Amendment are being cooked up even now by Sen. “Schemer” Schumer?

Tempted to believe the moonbat ravings of New York Times readers or the unhinged, Howard-Beale-like broadcasts of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that the 5-4 opinion presages a wholesale corporate takeover of the electoral process?

To get a sense of what really was at stake — nothing less than freedom of speech – have a look at this video, produced by the libertarian Cato Institute.  As Mark Tapscott noted yesterday in the Washington Examiner: (more…)

Thursday, in his resounding defense of the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

…[w]hen Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

“Censorship” is a dirty word in America, and that is why the restrictions at issue in our case were cloaked in the guise of “campaign finance reform.”  But the fact remains that any restrictions on political speech, especially those that criminalize such speech, send us down a very slippery and very dangerous slope.

Last March, our government argued in court that it has the Constitutional authority to ban books that mention a candidate for federal office.  The government later retracted that statement, but is there any doubt that such a statement never would have been made if there had not been 100 years of progressively more intrusive restrictions on political speech preceding it?    Had the Court not acted, what was to prevent the government from asserting that authority over the internet, which does not have the benefit of two centuries of tradition and jurisprudence protecting it?

(more…)

What a week!

Scott Brown defeats Martha Coakley in Massachusetts.  ”Health Care” on the ropes in Congress.   Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission puts paid to most of McCain-Feingold and breathes new life into the First Amendment.  Air America crashes and burns, and nobody hears a thing.   John Edwards turns out to be just as appalling a human being as we all knew he was.

Was this, as Jim DeMint promised,  Barack Obama’s… you know what?

For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)

Fans of the First Amendment can rejoice.  In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down large portions of the abomination known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially those aspects of the law that imposed restrictions on corporate spending on political issues.

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

(more…)