Strong opposition to government shutdown includes Republicans

The first paragraph of Byron York's article in the Washington Examiner says it all:

"A new poll done for Republican members of Congress has found huge public opposition, and solid opposition among Republicans, to the idea of shutting down the government over the issue of funding Obamacare."

An overwhelming 71 percent of Americans do not want a repeat of 1995 when Republicans shut down the government for three weeks. Even 61 percent of Republican women don't want to see Republicans go through with such a plan.

For those who were not paying attention in 1995 when the GOP shut down the government, it wasn't pretty. Google it. Or listen to the voices of experiences who have been there and done that, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, 69, and Joe Scarborough who was a congressman at the time.

Now a poll, commissioned by Republicans, is confirming that a shutdown will not bode well for the GOP. Will those "show horses" of the U.S. Senate, as the New York Times called Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco Rubio of Florida, continue to push for it?

Byron York, like others, can look at this poll and read the tea leaves:

"But there is no doubt defunding advocates anticipate a possible shutdown; their hope is to persuade the public to blame President Obama, and not Republicans, for it. The new numbers suggest they will have a lot of persuading to do."

It brings to mind once again American philosopher George Santayana's much-quoted belief, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Hopefully, GOP leadership and experienced voices will be able to stop the proposed fallacy.

Washington Examiner Wednesday headlines

Michael Barone - When politicians 'bicker,' they're really negotiating

The Constitution establishes not a single united government but an arena for conflict. The Founders expected the House, the Senate, the president and the courts to disagree, and they hoped the net result of those conflicts would be good governance.

Susan Ferrechio - GOP hoping to have votes to pass budget

Republican House leaders, eager to demonstrate that the party is united after a fractious debate over the 2011 federal budget, are working to secure enough GOP votes to pass a compromise deal when it comes up for a vote Thursday.

Brian Hughes – White House mum on Obama's deficit plan

How does President Obama plan to reduce the deficit? A simple enough question — but don't ask White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who rebuffed more than a dozen attempts to preview Obama's remarks at George Washington University Wednesday. Carney dismissed as speculation reports that Obama would essentially adopt the recommendations of his own deficit commission. However, he made clear that Obama's blueprint would provide a striking contrast to the plan put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who proposed a dramatic overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid. Read More

Mark Tapscott - If they can be shot at for their country, why won't their country let them drink?

Examiner Sunday Reflection contributor and Instapundit founder Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a great piece up tonight on The Wall Street Journal's web site making the case for allowing 18-year-olds to drink legally. The argument is simple and familiar: Read More

Michael Barone - Gangster government is always a danger, whoever is in power
We have just seen an episode,” I wrote in a May 5, 2009, column in the Washington Examiner, “of Gangster Government.” The subject of the column was the Chrysler bankruptcy package that was being hammered out by White House advisers Steven Rattner and Ron Bloom. Read More
Mark Tapscott - Boehner's top 16 things to love about the new budget deal

House Speaker John Boehner's office has released the following list of elements in the new budget deal that make it an important milestone on the road to restoring the nation's economic strength: Read More
Philip Klein - The top five failed defenses of RomneyCare

Mitt Romney announced on Monday that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president, which raised eyebrows because the news closely coincided with today’s fifth anniversary of the passage of his signature legislation as governor of Massachusetts, the state’s health care law. Read More

Susan Ferrechio - Boehner tells Obama tax increase is unacceptable

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, sent a warning to President Obama about his Wednesday speech on reducing the deficit that the GOP will not consider a tax hike. Read More

Conn Carroll - Obamacare’s $200 million propaganda campaign revealed

Judicial Watch has just posted the bounty from their latest Freedom of Information request, this time targeting the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “education” campaign for Obamacare. The documents include a Acquisition Plan entitled, “Independent Government Cost Estimate,” that sets a $200 million spending limit for televisions, radio, print and online communications. Read More
Philip Klein - Liberals put Obama on notice to lay off entitlements

With President Obama set to give a speech tomorrow afternoon laying out his strategy for reducing the long-term debt, liberal groups spent Tuesday warning him to back off Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- the biggest drivers of long-term debt. Read More

David Freddoso - Yglesias: Use debt crisis to 'punish our enemies'
In the heat of the 2010 campaign, President Obama famously uttered the line, "We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends." It looked so bad that he had to apologize later, but this isn't unfamiliar territory for a Chicago politician. Read More

Philip Klein - Will Obama, Democrats get behind the Fiscal Commission they previously ignored?

Last year, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of President Obama's Fiscal Commission, released (PDF) a deficit reduction proposal that received a lot of publicity, but ultimately little support from either party. Now that House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has released his own plan, will Obama and Democrats respond by embracing Bowles-Simpson? Read More

Timothy P. Carney - The Germans are beating us on solar, and the North Koreans are beating us on really tall hotels

Germany and Spain are beating us in solar panels. China is beating us on clean coal. We need to catch up! This is the refrain of many Democrats and enviro-writers. In a piece published by Reuters, Zachary Shahan writes "the U.S. is missing out on some serious global investment in cleantech as our completely dysfunctional Congress is taken hostage by Tea Party extremists." Read More

Byron York: "Journalists urged caution after Ft. Hood, now race to blame Palin after Arizona shootings"

Are journalists showing hypocrisy in their coverage of the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gibbons? Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent at the Washington Examiner, reveals what some are saying in the aftermath of this senseless act.

NASA charged by Obama to improve relations with Islamic world?

Is NASA a space agency ... or is it a private Obama United Nations? The Washington Examiner's chief political correspondent Byron York wrote about the startling news that hit air waves on Tuesday:

Michael Griffin, who headed NASA during the last four years of the Bush administration, says the space agency’s new goal to improve relations with the Islamic world and boost Muslim self-esteem is a “perversion” of NASA’s original mission to explore space.

“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics."

Mr. Griffin noted it was very bad policy for NASA to go in that direction and added, “NASA has been for 50 years above politics, and for 50 years, NASA has been focused by one president or another on space exploration.”

Byron York was on Fox News' Greta Van Sustern's show Tuesday night discussing the issue and reminded that the "S" in "NASA" stands for "Space." Let's hope pressure from the public makes the White House realize that and allows NASA to get back to what they know best: space exploration.

Byron York: "Top 10 dumbest things said about Arizona immigration law"

Liberal Democrats are seizing the opportunity, with help from the liberal MSM, to make Arizona sounds like a racist, out-of-control state after the recent passage of a tough immigration law, SB 1070.

Untruths and outright lies are circulating throughout the mainstream media while responsible journalists try to put the brakes on rampantly false information.

Washington Examiner columnist Byron York has assembled ten misleading statements from various sources, saying:

"... it’s hard to choose the most over-the-top and wrongheaded commentary on the law, but here are ten choices, in no particular order."

Wonder if those quoted have actually read the law....

Chris Matthews' selective memory loss toward conservatives

Don't you just love liberals and their selective memories? MSNBC's Chris Matthews is the perfect example in the latest round between less-than-presidential Barack Obama and conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh ... and the Washington Examiner's Byron York didn't let him get away with it:

On Friday, I asked Rush Limbaugh for his response to President Obama's description of him as "troublesome" and of his program as "vitriol." Limbaugh told me he does not believe Obama is trying to do what is best for the country and added, "Never in my life have I seen a regime like this, governing against the will of the people, purposely."

By using the word "regime," Limbaugh was doing something he does all the time: throwing the language of the opposition back in their faces. In the Bush years, we often heard the phrase "Bush regime" from some quarters of the left. So Limbaugh applied it to Obama.

After Chris Matthews made a big deal about Rush's use of the word "regime," Mr. York researched the word and, amazingly, a quick search found that it was used frequently by liberal progressive types:

It appears that Matthews has suffered a major memory loss. I don't have the facilities to search for every utterance of Joe McCarthy, but a look at more recent times reveals many, many, many examples of the phrase "Bush regime." In fact, a search of the Nexis database for "Bush regime" yields 6,769 examples from January 20, 2001 to the present.

The search also revealed its use by Maureen Dowd and the Washington Post. Selective memory loss by Chris Matthews and others on the left? Read Byron York's entire column here.

Thanks to Cato at Delmarva Dealings for the link.

Byron York: "In time of victory, why is the left so angry?"

Byron York has noted the anger from Democrats over the Tax Day tea parties and over the Silent Majority speaking out about taxes and overspending. In the Washington Examiner he remarks:

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

If you doubt it, just watch a few minutes of MSNBC, where the recent nationwide series of "tea parties" to protest federal spending and taxes set off an angry, almost manic response. The most telling came on Keith Olbermann's program, during which the actress Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI computer geek on “24,” denounced the tea parties as "racism straight up."

Read the entire article here.