Why Do You Run Somone For Every Seat?

Because occasionally your opponent in a strongly Democratic seat, will do a lot of stupid things.  Like Russ Carnahan* Lacy Clay(D-MO). Here’s proof that every email you receive from you Congressman really is a form letter.

h/t Middle Class and Mad As Hell

*That should tell you how much I expect something this stupid to be done by Rep Carnahan!

Note to Missouri Democrats

If you want to play the “Roy Blunt was having an affair with his now wife while still married to his former wife”, keep in mind that two sides can play at that game.  No evidence of Blunt’s “affair”.  Robin Carnahan’s relationship with her now husband, however, seems to have been admited to by Carnahan and her staff (her now husband was still married to his ex wife at the time.  Catherine Favazza has all the details. [An Affair to Remember in the Missouri Senate Race?]

McCowan Weaving a Tangled Web

Oh what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive.

~ Sir Walter Scott

SEIU thug Elston McCowan just can’t seem to keep his story straight.

As 24thstate.com’s Jim Durbin points out, Reverend Elston McCowan is having some consistency issues with his version of the events on the night of Congressman Carnahan’s health care town hall.  His original story of that night’s events come from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article published on August 8th.

But Elston McCowan, an SEIU staffer, said Gladney was actually an instigator. McCowan accused Gladney of attacking him as he walked to his car. McCowan said he suffered a dislocated shoulder.

“Out of nowhere, the guy just assaults me,” said McCowan, 47, of St. Louis.

McCowan’s quote makes it clear that he was jumped by Kenneth Gladney.  This wording makes it clear that there was absolutely no interaction between the two before the altercation.  If only McCowan would have stuck to this story.

After much backlash (and probably a lot of coaching from the SEIU), McCowan is changing his story.  His new version of events appears in, wait for it, Links: The International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Walking outside, McCowan saw Gladney selling buttons of Obama in blackface and Obama smoking weed. Feeling insulted, McCowan asked why a black man would be hawking material denigrating the first black president as he pointed to one of the buttons.

“When I pointed at the button, Gladney slapped my hand. So I told him not to hit me and pointed at it again and repeated my question. He smacked my hand even harder, hit me several times and pushed me down. As I went down, I grabbed him by reflex to break my fall. I hit my shoulder and something popped. I lost consciousness for a moment but soon realised that Gladney continued to hit me.

“Another SEIU guy, Perry Molens, came over and told Gladney, ‘He’s a minister and won’t fight back. He can’t see out of one eye. Stop hitting him!’. When Gladney kept on, Perry tried to get him off of me and threw a punch in the process.

“I don’t know why Gladney had an attorney on hand, but his attorney came over yelling ‘You two attacked him!’. Gladney went off to find cops and told them to arrest us. The cops wouldn’t listen to us and did what the Tea Party people told them to do. They arrested me, Perry, a newspaper reporter and three supporters of healthcare reform.”

This is a decidedly different story.  No longer is McCowan claiming that Gladney attacked him out of nowhere.  He now says that the dispute was over buttons of Obama in blackface and smoking pot.  It is a seemingly small change in the story, but if McCowan is willing to lie about how this we know he is certainly willing to lie about who the instigator was.

Here’s the other problem: No one can prove that these buttons exist.  Here are the six buttons that Gladney attorney David Brown says Gladney was selling (via same 24thstate.com posting)

Not one of those even has Obama pictured in it.

Jim put out a challenge: Find a picture of the buttons that McCowan was supposedly questioning.  A blogger by the name of Adam at St. Louis Activist Blog claimed to find the conclusive evidence.  He’s got a screen cap of a button with Obama in it that was on the board of another one of the button sellers (apparently another black conservative who was selling buttons for Gladney attorney David Brown The owner of this board is David Brown himself.  He runs a business on the side selling merchandise at political events.  He sold some of his buttons to Gladney.).

This is Adam’s conclusive evidence that a button of Obama smoking weed existed.  The problem is that the picture shows nothing of the sort.  In fact, I’m betting that most people here on RedState have probably seen the source image for this button several times.

Now, I will grant that I am one of the biggest squares around.  Even I can tell that this is not a picture of Barack Obama smoking pot.  It’s just your average, every day cancer stick (AKA tobacco cigarette).  I guess I could give a certain amount of leeway given the replacing of the word HOPE with DOPE why one would make this mistake considering that you really can’t see the difference on a low-resolution image taken from a YouTube video.  You would think that someone would make sure their evidence was air tight before going to print with it. {Oh, and Andy.  I’ve got a screen cap of your post.  Don’t try to send it down the memory hole.}

While it is true that Andy has shown that more than six buttons were for sale, there is still no evidence to support McCowan’s assertion.  He has already told two different versions of what happened that night.  How many more does he have to tell before he finally admits the truth?

Then again, McCowan isn’t the only one lying from that night.

Note: Corrected information comes from a follow-up post by Jim on 24thstate.com.

This About Sums Up the Current Health Care Debate

Instapundit:

Of course, Obama’s plan — and Big Government in general — is all about ensuring that we don’t have the right to decide how to spend our dollars but should instead let somebody else take them at gunpoint and decide how they’re spent. If the health care “reform” passes, you won’t have the option of directing your dollars where you think they should go. And to the pro-Obamcare folks, that’s not a bug, it’s the whole point.

Savor This For a Moment

54% Say Passing No Healthcare Reform Better Than Passing Congressional Plan

It’s not quite victory as we don’t actually control Congress, but damn, it’s good to see that we are winning the people over.

Make sure to take an extra person or two to your next townhall.  It seems to me that the tactic is working.

Fisking the President

Keith Hennessey does a remarkable job taking apart the President’s arguments from his town hall in Portsmouth the other day.  Warning:  It is quite long, so be prepared to dig in.

Defending Against Dishonesty

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote a very dishonest op-ed ["Defending the Indefensible"] attacking what they call “opponents of health reform”.  Here is my response that I left for them on their web site:

I guess this is one way to win an argument.

1. Claim that your opponents are arguing for something that they aren’t. Who exactly has put forward a plan that says “Keep everything exactly the way it is now”? Now, given that the makeup of Congress is such that the only plan that could possibly pass would be one that is decidedly more liberal (more apt to allow government control) than conservative, the outcome of the current session would be either a liberal plan or no plan. This does not mean that conservatives wish to maintain the status quo. People like Congressman Paul Ryan have been pushing a conservative option for a few years now.

2. And then quote questionable studies that are influenced by how much government controls health care to determine quality of said system to slime those opponents. What is it that a native son of Missouri used to say about statistics? It’s not all that hard to skew the results to be how you want them when you can control the input variables to favor your outcome.

3. While simultaneously assuming that the problem is really one of health insurance and not the health care industry. The cost of health insurance is a function of the health care market (or this thing that is supposed to be a market but hasn’t been a functioning market since 1965). As health care costs rise, so will health insurance premiums since we incentivize individuals to claim everything under the sun on their insurance plan.

4. Opponents have been making a coherent case. You just aren’t listening. See Rep Paul Ryan of above. See Michael Tanner and Michael Cannon at CATO. See Greg Scandlen. See a brilliant op-ed by Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey in the Wall Street Journal. Etc.

As to some of the points that you make.

1. Higher administrative costs exist because you are not comparing things that are alike. In other countries, as with Medicare and Medicaid, there are many costs that are not included in their budgets. For example, in the private health care market, insurance companies have to have departments for billing, legal teams, etc that government run entities include in other budgets. The costs of the IRS collecting premiums are not included in the costs of Medicare. Neither is the costs of prosecuting those who commit fraud against the system. The same goes for many other countries. They shift those costs to other departments to make their numbers look better. {Gee, that sounds an awful lot like Enron style accounting to me}

2. Wasteful spending exists for several reasons. First, doctors practice a lot of CYA. They get sued (a lot). The best defense against a law suit is to show that you “did everything you could”. Even if that means ordering tests that have little to no benefit to diagnosis. Second, people bear a small portion of the costs of their decisions. When covered by insurance, the cost difference between an X-ray or an MRI seem quite small. When an X-ray will suffice (which costs far less) many will insist on receiving the MRI because they think it will give better results (at much higher cost). Because of the insurance coverage that they do have, they never see the true impact of that decision.

3. People most assuredly will lose their current coverage under the current proposals in front of congress. Own an insurance plan that is not exchange approved? You can keep it until the company has to alter the plan. Then you are forced to buy a policy from the exchange which is likely to be more expensive than the one you had before. On a company run plan? When faced with the decision between paying you $4000 for your individual plan or $12000 for a family plan versus a $750 fine for not providing insurance coverage, which do you think your employer is going to choose? If you said that they would continue to offer coverage you should be reminded that companies are looking to cut costs everywhere, especially these days. And cutting costs by millions of dollars would just be far too attractive to many companies to ignore.

A topic that you really miss covering here is how the current proposals will lead to a decrease in employee wages. If an employer is required to provide insurance coverage or face a fine, their costs of employing someone are going to go up in either instance if they don’t already offer health coverage. In an environment where wages are already seeing very slow growth, this would shift additional compensation dollars to health care since employers already cannot afford to both increase wages and health care premium contributions at adequate rates. Forcing them to put more into the health care premium contribution means that there will be fewer dollars available for wage increases. In extreme cases, this could even mean a reduction in either wages or number of employees if costs get too far out of hand.

{P.S. Is this reasoned enough debate for you? Or am I just trying to “fear monger” as you have so broadly painted the “anti-reformists”?}

Meet Elston McCowan

This is Elston McCowan.

Elston K. McCowan is a former organizer – now the Public Service Director of SEIU Local 2000 – and board member of the Walbridge Community Education Center, and is a Baptist minister, has been a community organizer for more than 23 years, and now, he is running for Mayor of the City of St. Louis under the banner of the Green Party of St. Louis.

[ed: This was from before the election.  McCowan is now a former nominee of the Green Party.]

All of that sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?  Well, except for the position with the SEIU and the whole Green Party thing (think Cynthia McKinney).

The problem with McCowan is that he is something more.  McCowan is a thug.

Visit Your Congressman to Talk Healthcare

Just click here to schedule a meeting with your Congresscritter to share your thoughts about healthcare reform.

Awful nice of the Obama Campaign, or Administration…or whatever, to help us out with this.

“Don’t Tread On Me”

Those were the words of Kenneth Gladney.  These words however were spoken by his lawyer since Gladney was under heavy medication as a result of the beating he took at the hands of SEIU thugs.

St. Louis Tea Party Protest @ SEIU Office – August 8, 2009 from Brian Simpson on Vimeo.

If you can’t see the video it is of a speech by St. Louis Tea Party’s Bill Hennessey and the attorney for Kenneth Gladney.

I’m hoping for a transcript of the prepared statement soon.

You can see some of the pictures of the “mob” here. Do these people look dangerous?

Full photostream here.

More on this at Gateway Pundit, Josh Schroeder’s blog, and Amir Kuritovic.