Top Solyndra executives are scheduled to appear today before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. But that’s all they’ll be doing.

Here: National Review Online: Seven Solyndra Questions.

The Whitman campaign now refuses to discuss her voting history. When asked for records of her ’98 registration or voting record in an interview Whitman replied “Go find it.”

UPDATE: Whoops! Tokoni Inc. Meg Whitman’s million-dollar internet firm posted this story from SacBee’s homepage today,  calling Meg out on a possible lie about her voting history, and tweeted it from three different accounts! (The tweets seem to have been posted by a bot). 

…In the first six months of 2009, Meg Whitman paid Tokoni $943,067.54. As of this posting the story is still up on Tokoni’s home page. Let us know if they remove it, we have screen-shots.

The state raised taxes in February in a foolish attempt to keep up government spending: The result? We got a deficit of $26 billion, a stalled legislature and hundreds of thousands of IOUs for taxpayers who were already just scraping by.

Now our sales tax and income tax are higher, the auto registration fee is doubled, and state revenues keep going down.  Do the policymakers think twice about a tax cut? No. Instead A special session is prepared to hear how the Commission on the 21^st Century Economy plans to raise taxes even more with their stealth business tax proposal.

When you jumped on the bed, your parents would tell you to stop or you’d fall and hurt yourself. Sacramento has already fallen and broken its legs, but it keeps getting back up to jump again.

Over 700,000 have lost their jobs in 2009 and counting. It seems like the policymakers won’t learn until California becomes a scene from Oliver Twist, with every citizen in a soup kitchen asking “can I have some more.”

She’s tall, blonde and looks you straight in the eye on meeting. You tell her about a local shipping port issue. She asks for more details and clearly understands the economic significance of the issue in the greater scheme of things.

A few minutes later she’s at the podium telling her personal story in an engaging way, then shifting to the very large problems facing the state. In clear, crisp fashion she tells her audience what she wants to do about them.

She is Meg Whitman and she is running for Governor of California. Like Ronald Reagan more than four decades earlier, she is traveling the state introducing herself to potential supporters in cities and towns large and small. [Read More]

Van Jones, who is was undoubtedly a communist, and quite surely is a potty-mouth, isn’t so certain he’s a 9/11 Truther. He did sign the 9/11Truth.Org petition but he didn’t review it carefully enough—if he had, he would probably have disagreed. Mmhhmm…

President Obama’s plan to inspire the nation’s schoolchildren with a video address next week erupted into controversy Wednesday, forcing the White House to pull out its eraser and rewrite a government recommendation that teachers nationwide assign students a paper on how to “help the president.”

Presidential aides acknowledged the White House helped the U.S. Education Department craft the proposal, which immediately was met by fierce criticism from Republicans and conservative organizations who accused Mr. Obama of trying to politicize the education system.

White House aides said the language was an honest misunderstanding in what was supposed to be a inspirational, pro-education message to America’s youths.

Among the activities the government initially suggested for prekindergarten to sixth-grade students: that they “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Another task recommended for students immediately after listening to the speech: to engage in a discussion about what “the president wants us to do.”

Remember this?

Van Jones, Obama’s “Green Jobs” Czar, three months earlier:

Maybe Meg forgot that she officially registered as an [asshole] in 2007, and is running as an [asshole] for Governor of California. Out of touch, not ready for primetime, and RINO come to mind.

Thoughts on Meg’s support for Obama’s potty-mouthed-communist-9/11 truther czar? Leave a comment.

Most politicos don’t usually socialize with terror apologists. Generally, they are cautious to a fault. Which is why a political event today in Sacramento raises serious questions of what were they thinking.   The extremist group CAIR ([Council on] American-Islamic Relations) recently issued a press release announcing its 6th Annual Ramadan Iftar inside the Capitol Rotunda (see the release with a full list of legislative co-hosts attached to the bottom of this post).

The Iftar is co-hosted by most of the legislative Democrats including Senate President Darrell Steinberg.  Speaker Karen Bass, plus the Governor. Tragically, Steinberg, Bass and the Governor are clueless about CAIR. The FBI described CAIR front group for Hamas. CAIR was also an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism case in Texas Federal Court last year.

Read “CAIR, HAMAS, ARNOLD AND THE DEMS” at the Flash Report for the full story.

The week of August 17 was a special one for the men in uniform who are considered the fathers of the modern Special Operations Forces so critical to today’s armed forces: The Marine Raiders, whose heroism in World War II was saluted with the opening of Raider Hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The crucial role played in the Pacific by the four Raider battalions in the early days of World War II was highlighted in remarks delivered by a former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Alfred Grey. Raider Hall features equipment and exhibits about the Marines, who conducted amphibious landings in the island battles in the Pacific and operated behind enemy lines.  [Read More]

(H/T John Gizzi at Human Events)

From the San Jose Mercury News:

“I have received a great deal of encouragement to make a run for the Senate in 2010 from people across the political spectrum,” Fiorina said in a news release. “Today’s filing … is a logical next step in the process of evaluating running for this office.”

Fiorina will face conservative Assemblyman Chuck DeVore in the Republican primary before facing Boxer in the fall.

Still waiting for an apology from the “journalist” who said the artist must have been a conservative racist:

The Joker’s makeup in “Dark Knight” — the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world — emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its “we need to talk this through” episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama’s association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.

So what are you waiting for? Go flag yourself!

“Governments don’t tax to get the money they need, governments will always find a need for the money they get.”

Mark Lloyd has recently been appointed “Chief Diversity Officer” at the Federal Communications Commission. Conservative groups believe his installation is merely another way to impose the dangerous principles contained in the Fairness Doctrine.

Lloyd is a longtime Democrat activist who has strategized about ways to censor conservative media under the guise of “local accountability.” In 2007, he co-wrote a report that called for, among other things, the restoration of local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations and fines for commercial radio station owners if their stations didn’t air enough “progressive” content.  [Read More]

–

This appointment is just another way for the Democrats to interject unconstitutional policies into the lives of the American people.  If “progressive” talk radio was what Americans wanted to hear, it would be just as  popular as conservative talk radio; yet this has not been the case.  It is obvious that the Obama Administration knows that, like healthcare, Americans don’t want the fairness doctrine.  But just as the White House is shoving Nationalized Healthcare down our throats, they will persist to enact the “fairness doctrine” with or without our endorsement.

I’ve been involved in conservative and Republican activism for a couple of years, and knowing conservatives, I suspected something fishy was going on that the media wasn’t getting right. Enter Lyndon LaRouche and his lunatic followers. The Nazi references aren’t coming from conservatives opposed to nationalized health care, but from a fanatical fringe group that thinks Obama Care isn’t going far enough:

More at Hot Air: “The Origin of “Nazi” References at Town-hall protests“

Public support for the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats has fallen to a new low as just 42% of U.S. voters now favor the plan. That’s down five points from two weeks ago and down eight points from six weeks ago. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that opposition to the plan has increased to 53%, up nine points since late June.

The President already started retooling ObamaCare at a “townhall” in New Hampshire.  President Obama came out to a crowd of seemingly hand-picked supporters to make a strong defense for his health care plans. Philip Klein at the American Spectator says the President is lying about a single-payer health system.  Klein cites at 2003 speech in which Obama clearly supported a single payer system, Jim Geraghty at National Review Online points to Obama’s support of a single-payer system as late as last year.

It looks like the Democrats’ push to unite voters behind ObamaCare, has actually united them in opposition.

UPDATE: The President claimed  at the townhall event that the AARP endorsed Obama Care. The problem: The AARP hasn’t endorsed it.

Barack Obama’s decision to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson has generated unexpected but emotionally charged opposition. Appointed by then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as high commissioner for human rights in 1997-2002, Ms. Robinson had a controversial but ineffective tenure. (Previously, she was president of Ireland, a ceremonial position.)

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s award, to be officially bestowed tomorrow, has centered on Ms. Robinson’s central organizing role as secretary general of the 2001 “World Conference Against Racism” in Durban, South Africa. Instead of concentrating on its purported objectives, Durban was virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and at least implicitly anti-American.

So vile was the conference’s draft declaration that Secretary of State Colin Powell correctly called it “a throwback to the days of ‘Zionism equals racism,’” referring to the infamous 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution to that effect. President George W. Bush (whose father led the 1991 campaign that repealed the U.N.’s “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution) unhesitatingly agreed when Mr. Powell recommended the U.S. delegation leave the Durban conference rather than legitimize the outcome.

Ms. Robinson didn’t see it that way then, and she has shown no remorse since. In late 2002, she described Durban’s outcome as “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.” [Read More]

The Speaker and Mr. Hoyer breeze through the obligatory caveat saying they believe  ”the dialogue between elected representatives and constituents is at the heart of our democracy,” just before slamming the actions of nationalized health care opponents as “Un-American.” To be clear, the column itself is not as inflammatory as the title, Pelosi and Hoyer voice their opposition to “drowning out” the debate with chants and boos, and call out a few cases of truly disruptive behavior. But, on the whole, opponents to nationalized health care have been calm and civil in expressing their concerns to their elected representatives.

What Pelosi and Hoyer consider “un-American” disruption, is an attempt at the substantive debate they claim to want. While the many congressmen who have been confronted at town hall meetings are the ones “drowning out opposing views.”

A reader of National Review Online’s The Corner blog wrote to Rich Lowry this morning about the Pelosi/Hoyer column:

Loved this line from your An Empire of Liberty, quote:”In January 1817 a chastened lame-duck Fourteenth Congress met to debate the issue of exactly what representation meant, and by and large it determined that the people had every right to instruct their congressmen.”

I think that’s the same exact disconnect that is occurring today. The servants have come to think of themselves as the sovereigns.

The NRO reader is right on target, Congressmen are as much servants of the public today as they were in 1817. When town hall meetings across the country  are full of angry constituents opposing a bill, chances are the bill is bad—if it’s not a bad bill, then it is the duty of the elected representative to answer constituents questions and persuade them. If he can’t, he should vote  the way his constituents choose, or get fired, he is their employee. That’s popular Democracy. . .Isn’t that what the Democratic Party claims to stand for?

For the last eight years Democrats claimed that President Bush and Republicans were calling them un-American, even-though it never happend. Now the same people are actually calling the opposition un-American.