“I am raising the stakes right now, … If this is a poker game, I am shoving my chips right in the middle of the table. I am raising the ante. Anybody who wants out, can get out.”

It was Nov 22, 2000. The New York Giants has just lost their second straight game to the lowly Detroit Lions at the Meadowlands, the fans and media were as angry as Tony Soprano when he found out Janice took out a loan on Livia’s house.

Obama has tried to give a version of this speech, but his problem is that he does not connect with people emotionally. He just doesn’t. It’s just part of his personality. Sometimes I wonder if he is a robot as he appears to often lack any emotion at all. Look left, look right, read teleprompter, speak in clipped measure, thank everybody, leave, repeat.

The most amazing aspect of this entire episode is this…they tell me Obama is the greatest communicator ever, that nobody can give a speech like him, but he can’t sell this. Obama…can’t…sell this. He can give a prepared speech sure, but anything other than that incurs a lot of ‘umms’. Since he can’t sell it, he now has two weeks to save everything. Two weeks. That’s it. If Jesus rises and this bill hasn’t passed…its dead.

AP-via WSJ (click image for source)If it passes it will pass 216-215. I would wager any amount on this. If it fails, there is a very good chance the vote is 215-216, though anywhere between 210-215 is possible. The fact that the WH is now going after people like Kucinich shows that they really don’t have the votes as they have given up trying to convince people like Stupak. The Kucinich moves smells of desperation. The possibility exists that Pelosi will believe she has 216 votes, and then on the floor someone has a moment of consciousness and changes their vote to no. It’s possible.

That said, if I had a gun to my head right now, I would say it passes 216-215.

Justice McNamara

**Update (Russ)**

I received this from JM yesterday but, being at the Surge, I couldn’t get it posted until now. News today is that, of course, Kucinich is a yes.

Am I missing something?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from The Resistance

This one is way more on-the-fly than I’m used to. I pretty much decided to go about 15 minutes ago. Gonna get back in the whip in a couple of hours and join a whole bunch of my friends to tell D.C., one more goddamn time, that we just ain’t buyin’ what they’re sellin’.

Like always, I’ll be sending back as many pictures as possible and live-blogging here and through the Resistance for as long as the battery on my phone lasts. Stay tuned…there’s shenanigans a-brewin’.

Quick though, doesn’t it seem kinda odd that thousands of American citizens have to organize an emergency rally in the nation’s capital because the powers that be will stop at nothing-no matter how unconstitutional, unethical or downright tyrannical it may be-to force socialized health care on us? Is this really what the Founders had in mind?

Well, maybe not the unconstitutionally imposed health care, but the massive citizen mobilization I think they may have. As red hot as I get watching the overlords throw down the gauntlet on our liberty, my heart pumps equally as fast watching my fellow Americans gear up to throw down our own.

Like it or not, only one group is gonna win this fight in the long run.

My money’s still on us.

Russ

Thankfully, (with more competent moderators than yours truly this time), I don’t have to because our friends Scratch from MMBI and Don from Present Discontent are going to do it for us. Hosted by the inimitable Steve from Motor City Times, here is the Ep.3-Rd.1 question:

Some people think, long term, that a true Conservative 3rd party is necessary, because the Republicans have proven only slightly better than Democrats when they were in power. The thinking goes, we are never going to change Washington, so why bother voting in the Republicans.

Other say that we need to refocus the Republicans because if we actually form a 3rd party, we are guaranteeing that the left will win election after election.

The question is what should the focus of Conservatives be going forward, a revitalized Republican party or a true Conservative party?

Great, great question.

A snippet from Scratch:

We need to send a message. We need to demand candidates, of whatever party other than the established two, that will vow to adhere to the Constitution and shrink the ever expanding federal government. No new “contracts” or “Mt. Vernon” nonsense. Each politician must read - and adhere to - the Constitution.

And one from Don:

But the Republican Party is slow to move and I know that infuriates a lot of folks on our side of the aisle. However, we need to remember that just because we might be able to launch third party. And let’s just say for the sake of argument that we actually take the White House in ’12, without changing the rules in D.C. we won’t have accomplished much. If the GOP can get sloppy and bloated and addicted to Big Government and back room deals and…well you get the picture, then so can a new third party.

Read ‘em both in their entirety because, like it or not, this is something we’re all gonna have to deal with at some point, most likely sooner than later.

Me? For right now I’m just trying to find a Jersey bus leaving for D.C. Anyone out there know of one let me know. If I do catch a ride, I’ll have tons of pictures and will live-blog the day’s events here and at the Resistance.

Check Scratch, Don and Steve often for further debate and reactions from the peanut gallery on this extremely important question.

Russ

You know how bad things are in Canada right? Well, just remember that we have ten times the population to insure. Oh, but that means there's ten times the number of doctors you say? So what, I say. When doctors here realize that they are no longer practicing a profession but rather unwittingly serving a master like they did there, how long do you think it'll be before the exact same thing that happened there, happens here? The answer is "way sooner than later". And what happens then? Your guess is as good as mine.

Posted via email from The Resistance

Suspected drug gang hit men separately ambushed two cars carrying families with ties to the U.S. consulate in this violent border city, killing an American couple and a Mexican man. Three young children survived, although two suffered wounds.

The slayings came amid a surge in bloodshed along Mexico’s border with Texas and drew condemnation from the White House. Mexico’s president expressed outrage and promised a fast investigation to find those responsible.

Authorities put suspicion on members of a gang of hit men allied with the Juarez drug cartel. That theory is based on “information exchanged with U.S. federal agencies” helping in the investigation, according to a statement Sunday from the joint mission of soldiers and federal police overseeing security in Ciudad Juarez.

While putting the blame on the drug gang, police offered no information on a possible motive in the slayings. U.S. State Department spokesman Fred Lash said only that the three dead people were at the same party before the attacks that occurred minutes apart Saturday afternoon.

Several U.S. citizens have been killed in Mexico’s drug war, most of them people with family ties to Mexico. It is very rare for American government employees to be targeted, although attackers hurled grenades at the U.S. consulate in the northern city of Monterrey in 2008.

For me, there are really only two ways to stop the escalating drug gang-related violence south of the border: Start a war and take over the country or legalize the problem. I’d prefer the second but I for one am open to ideas concerning the first. I’m only half kidding.

The bottom line is that Mexico’s police/military force is wholly unequipped to handle this problem and, quite frankly, I’m not so sure the top brass in the country have any real plans to take care of it.

Of course, it’s our fault Americans are getting waxed in the drug war:

Local media coverage of drug violence was rare even before the kidnappings. Milenio, the Mexican national paper, said publicly last week that it had decided to suspend coverage of the conflict out of security concerns.

“It’s an incredible level of fear,” said Carlos Lauria, the senior Americas coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. “It’s not only drug coverage that gets stifled, but any coverage of organized crime.”

Mexico has been engulfed by drug-related violence over the past few years, caused partly by a breakdown in old alliances between groups that erupted into open competition for lucrative smuggling routes to serve the world’s largest drug-consuming nation, the U.S.

In related news, cocaine use, like everything else under the sun, causes global warming.

Russ

Here’s Slowhand:

Nate Beeler-Washington Examiner

The mystical “center” of American politics has been a myth as long as I’ve been alive, like unicorns and the dodo bird. It may have existed at point prior to 1977, that I can’t say for sure. But there is no center now and there most likely never will be again. We need to make ideological oppressivism (a/k/a liberal progressivism) a permanent remant of an era gone by. A dirty little mistake in American History that you tell your grandkids to scare them when they’re bad. “Don’t ever grow up to be a liberal little Johnny…or you’ll wind up serving drinks to the lawyers in Hell.”

Well done Mr. President. Let nobody ever tell me again that this man hasn’t accomplished something great. He’s managed to draw the long overdue political and ideological battle lines more starkly than anyone of his predecessors could, in only a little over a year in office.

That is no small feat.

Russ

Seriously though, it’s amazing how a place like lower Manhattan, that you know relatively well while sober, turns into the friggin’ forests of Narnia with low fog and no visibility after sampling a couple “Highland” and “Lowland” Scottish whiskeys on Stone St. I had no idea where I was…for hours. It may as well have been Neptune.

My apologies.

Here’s something funny to make up for it:

(language/content warning)

Also, if you haven’t already, check out the Resistance. It’s basically six great bloggers and me. I’m the comic relief and no, I have no illusions that you’re laughing with me. I can live with that.

Russ