Oliver Willis

Looks like they’re all the same around the country

Republicans in the Maryland Senate unplugged their computers, picked up their belongings and marched out of the chamber yesterday afternoon in protest of a frantic push by Democrats to pass a stack of hotly contested bills.

Infuriated members strode up the marble State House staircase to the offices of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), who applauded them for the rare walkout and declared that four years of “monopoly frustration has come to a head.”

The display came on the most tense day of the 2006 General Assembly session, with just 90 minutes remaining for Democrats to get legislation to the governor’s desk and still leave time for a future override vote, should Ehrlich choose to veto the bills.

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As I always say, if we’ve got a liberal media, they’re doing a horrible job at it. But in fact, the media is not liberal, and while the mainstream press isn’t quite yet a Rush Limbaugh hatefest, it is clearly hostile to Democrats.

Quite a few of us have argued that the Democratic party needs to not cede the national security issue to the Republicans. Especially considering their horrible record on it, and past success under Democratic presidents, it was just dumb — and in a post-9/11 world, the recipe for political failure.

So they finally got their stuff in gear and released a detailed document on national security. Whether the Republican party gives it their blessing or not is immaterial, they’re too busy explaining away the failure to capture/kill Bin Laden as now being a good thing. But at the very least it should get covered in the press.

Instead the Washington Post buried it, and the New York Times, supposedly the bulwark of liberalism (from Howard Dean’s lips to their keyboards, they say) didn’t even cover the story at all.

The Democratic party’s failings in the national security conversation are very real and are instrumental to the party’s long term viability, but it is simply clear the press has decided to dispense with actually covering Democratic iniatives in that policy sector. I seriously can’t tell you anymore the difference between the RNC propaganda mill or the mainstream press.

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Gallup: In Shift, More Americans Now Call Themselves Democrats

In a (perhaps) historic shift, more Americans now consider themselves Democrats than Republicans, the Gallup organization revealed today.

Republicans had gained the upper hand in recent years, but 33% of Americans, in the latest Gallup poll, now call themselves Democrats, with those favoring the GOP one point behind. But Gallup says this widens a bit more “once the leanings of Independents are taken into account.”

>> Brand Democrat

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At Wizbang, someone named Kim Priestap writes about tomorrow’s Democratic national security announcement and ends with this bon mot:

Osama won’t be intimidated by this bunch.

Critiques of the Democrats aside (too much strategy not enough rhetoric, I say - more on that later but just think John Kerry redux), this just shows what the thought process is like inside the cult. In what way possible is Osama “intimidated” by Bush? In Bush he’s got the dream sap he’s always wanted. Bush does exactly what Osama would like him to do, and its driving up recruiting - not for the U.S. military, but for Al Qaeda.

And as we move towards the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bin Laden remains alive and on the loose. If that’s “intimidated”, I’d hate to see his “perturbed” look.

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