As President Obama called on his activists around the country to attend “thousands of events this month” in an effort to convince legislators that they, not the 55% of voters who oppose the Obama/Kennedy/Pelosi health care overhaul proposals, represent the majority of Americans (or, as a DailyKos diarist put it, “the collective will of the American people”), the Democratic National Committee was releasing an ad decrying the Obamacare-opposing “mob” as a bunch of Limbaugh-loving, Bible-carrying, extremist “birther” sheeple.

The ad is below:

Interestingly, the same crowd that is currently spending time and money to organize a campaign denigrating the “mob’s” dissent spent the last 8 years proclaiming such “mob” actions to be the quintessential example of Constitutionally-protected, God-given Freedom of Speech. This includes the current President, who spent that time and the decades before it acting as a professional rabble-rousing astroturfer (something that makes his sensitivity to such tactics understandable, but his apparent inability to recognize real dissent and outrage, rather than its manufactured counterpart, more than a bit puzzling).

As Jim Geraghty wrote this morning in a post titled “When More Than Half Dislike Your Ideas, It’s More Than ‘The Right-Wing Base’“:

I think the DNC — and Democrats, and the Obama administration — are on the verge of making a serious error by dismissing folks who show up at constituent meetings as “the mob.” …Skepticism of this health care plan goes way, way beyond “the right wing Republican base.” Alternatively, the right wing Republican base now amounts to a bit more than half of the voting public. …In the face of numbers like these, what do Democrats gain from a message like this[?]

Beyond being a whiplash-inducing reversal of position from the last 8 years (remember Hillary Clinton screeching “WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!”?), the left’s change of position on both free speech and community organizing has negated what they portrayed as President Obama’s strongest qualification for the office (which isn’t saying much, given his overall lack of qualifications): his experience as a community organizer.

Even more striking is the fact that those the DNC and Obama now insultingly claim are organizing and provoking the angry “mob” are, to use Obama campaign rhetoric from just last year, doing the same work Jesus did when He was on the earth.

It’s often striking to consider the swiftness of the people’s reversal on Jesus Himself, from a king’s entrance on Palm Sunday to condemnation and crucifixion just days later. With the Democrats’ sudden 180° on the actions of those they compared to Jesus just months ago, we have a living, current example of just how such a change can happen.

The Department of Defense is moving forces from Okinawa to Guam – all well and good. Except, the recently passed DOD Authorization contains funding for construction firms to pay their workers wages consistent with labor rates in Hawaii – 250% HIGHER than wages in Guam.

This will not only take over $10 billion (over 10 years) needed dollars out of the pockets of wounded service members, but will pad the pockets of Hawaii’s labor unions while hurting small businesses in Guam.

As we vote on funding for critical programs for our Nation’s Veterans and construction of our military instillations, it is important to ensure the timely and adequate delivery of these services.

This provision provides labor unions dollars, that in my opinion, are more crucial and can be better spent on military hospitals as they deliver first-class health care to our wounded soldiers.

Gentlemen (Ladies, you’ll have to pardon me):

Megan Fox explains modern American politics.

With her body.

Go here now.

Consider this an open thread . . . just not that open.

Everyone complains about corruption, but . . . well . . . it’s not that no one does anything about it. Rather, it’s more that traditional anti-corruption efforts are so ineffective. We can pass laws until the cows come home, but all the laws in the world have done nothing to curb corruption.

Dan Mitchell makes these points and then offers an alternative anti-corruption plan–shrink the size of government. It’s a good plan, and it will most certainly work better than what we have tried thus far in terms of combating corruption. Take a look:

It’s turning out to be quite the day for fiscal revelations. The latest is Pete Visclosky (D-IN), who is celebrating his recent drop in campaign contributions with a request to use what he has remaining for his upcoming legal… expenses:

Visclosky wants to dip into fundraising to pay legal fees

Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) is seeking to confirm that he can reach into his $900,000 campaign war chest to pay his legal fees arising from an FBI investigation of his campaign fundraising.

In a March letter to the Federal Election Commission released Monday, the treasurer of Visclosky’s campaign is seeking an advisory opinion allowing the use of campaign funds to pay expenses relating to the FBI’s investigation of contributions from the PMA Group and its clients.

See also here (via Instapundit). It’s turning out to be a month for this sort of thing. Visclosky, Thompson, Feinstein, Dodd, Moran, Durbin, Pelosi (with a nod to Harman), Summers, Rattner, Murtha… get the point? Because we can keep going: that list barely touches the House, not to mention the executive branch.

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Harry Reid thinks that it is perfectly fine to filibuster judges appointed by Republican Presidents, but that it would be a sin against the Lord to filibuster Democratic health care reform plans. The fact that Reid is a Democrat probably has something to do with this, though you will never catch Reid admitting that. Not only is the Senate Majority Leader a hypocrite, he also is deluded enough to think that others have not caught and will not catch him on his hypocrisy.

Oh, and Reid engaged in more name-calling in which the facts undermine the insults–as Ed Whelan points out, it’s kind of bizarre to claim that one was fooled by John Roberts when one voted against Roberts come confirmation time. Not that I think Harry Reid is difficult to fool, of course, but in this case, Roberts did nothing to fool Reid. Reid is just fooling himself. He does that a lot.

One may well think so after having read this:

Just as the economic news was relentlessly negative until the last few days, poll numbers for Republicans were horrific for months. So the GOP should be heartened by the first encouraging polling news it has received perhaps since Lehman Brothers defaulted in mid-September: Republicans have pulled even with Democrats on the generic congressional ballot test, according to a survey by a respected pair of firms.

In the new National Public Radio poll conducted by the Democratic polling company Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and its Republican counterpart, Public Opinion Strategies, 42 percent of the 800 likely voters surveyed March 10 to 14 said that if the next congressional election were held today they would vote for the Republican candidate; an identical percentage of respondents said they would vote for the Democratic one. For several years, Democrats held a substantial lead on this question.

Democrats still outnumbered Republicans in terms of party identification in this poll by 6 points, 45 percent to 39 percent. Democrats also favored their own party’s congressional candidates 83 percent to 7 percent. But voters who call themselves independents gave GOP candidates the edge by 14 points, 38 percent to 24 percent. And self-identified Republicans supported their own party’s candidates 85 percent to 3 percent.

Republican pollster Glen Bolger, who worked on the survey for Public Opinion Strategies, says that this is the first time since 2004 that he has seen independents favoring Republicans on the generic ballot test. Although he concedes that poll participants agreed — by margins of 6 to 11 points — with Democrats more than Republicans on each of the issues tested, he contends that the generic question’s results are “evidence that voters, particularly independents, are worried that they overcorrected in the 2006/2008 elections combined, and now have more of a liberal slant to government than they want. They want change but with checks and balances.”

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