Dottie Bailey for state rep in District 110

Dottie Bailey

A classic Tea Party vs. RINO battle is taking place in a safely Republican state representative district in southwest St. Louis County (mostly Eureka and parts of Pacific and Wildwood). It’s a battle for the soul of the Republican Party that demands your attention, even if, like me, you don’t live anywhere near the district.

I proudly endorse Dottie Bailey, who has been a Tea Party activist for several years. Bill Hennessy, co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition, is her campaign treasurer. She is actively engaged in the grassroots activity of Heritage Action for America (a political affiliate of The Heritage Foundation) as a Sentinel. Her efforts to curb abuses by the unaccountable Consumer Finance Protection Bureau were recognized on a national level when Heritage Action honored her with a plaque on its national Wall of Honor. She was also in the forefront of the Tea Party’s humanitarian BUYcott to save small Ferguson businesses (mostly minority owned) after the Michael Brown riots in 2014. Hennessy has written extensively about her efforts here and here.

But it was Dottie’s interaction with her children’s school district that led directly to this contest. Bill Hennessy reports how she attends school board meetings, demanding the district promote liberty and sound fiscal management. She protested the district’s recklessness and cronyism, which had prompted former State Auditor Tom Schweich to give the district a failing grade. When this state rep seat opened up unexpectedly this year with the retirement of respected conservative Rep. Kirk Matthews, Dottie filed for the seat. Days later, Matt Doell, a director from the school board, filed against her in the Republican primary. Another school board director serves as his campaign treasurer and the current board president wrote his campaign a check.

The contest has turned into a classic Establishment vs. Grassroots battle. As of July 26, Doell had outraised Dottie, $33,381 to $25,665. Dottie hates having to ask people for money. What Dottie has instead is an army of enthusiastic volunteers, as well as her own personal work ethic. Hennessy reports that Dottie has already knocked on 3,000 doors. She also has the support of respected conservative leaders, including current State Rep. Kirk Matthews, County Councilman Mark Harder, and former House Speaker Tim Jones, who represented this area.

To see the battle lines, follow the money.  Doell’s big contributors are primarily  contractors and their employees, individuals with Democrat, labor or establishment Republican ties, and the education establishment. The big money is from contractors, with the Government Affairs Committee of the St. Louis Chapter National Electrical Contractors Association, AGC of MO PAC, ASA Midwest PAC, Mason Contractors Association and employees of electrical contractors pitching in over $10,000. This includes an individual $500 donation from Guarantee Electric’s David Gralike, whose late father Donald Gralike was president of IBEW Local 1 and a Democratic state senator. (I have been unable to confirm whether Doell contributor Tim Green is the former north county Democratic state senator of that name.) Ray Wagner, husband of RINO Congresswoman Ann Wagner, donated $500, and his employer’s PAC, Enterprise Holdings PAC, added another $750. Better Schools for Missouri PAC donated $1,000 to Doell, and the Missouri State Teachers Association Legislative Impact Committee added another $250. Both of those “education” PACs mainly support teachers unions and donate primarily to Democrats. The Swamp.

In contrast, Dottie’s PAC money comes from traditional conservative sources, including $500 from Leadership for America, the leadership PAC of former Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones, and $500 from Missouri Club for Growth. Her largest PAC contribution was $2,600 from the Next Generation GOP PAC. David Humphreys, the conservative businessman Claire McCaskill loves to hate, pitched in $2,600 earlier this month. World Wide Technology’s David Steward donated $500, and his CL PAC added another $1,000. Where Dottie has clearly outraised Doell is from individuals contributing $100 or less. Grassroots. If you would like to add your own grassroots contribution to Dottie, you can do so here.

Jefferson City needs Dottie’s principled conservative voice.

Anti-Trump protests reminiscent of 2009 tactics

The Unablogger

Left-wing protesters succeeded in shutting down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago last week. Protest leaders admitted that their goal had been to shut down the event, not just protest it, and claimed victory. In fact, their admitted plans were to storm the stage when Trump appeared and overwhelm security by their numbers. Violence.

Democrats and the mainstream media (I know, that’s redundant) are hyperventilating. They are charging Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, with encouraging mob action at Trump rallies. Democrat front runner Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “political arson.” A Washington Post columnist blamed Trump for the “anger his divisive rhetoric has generated among the demonstrators,” accusing him of “reaping a whirlwind of his own creation.” Ezra Klein regaled in Trump’s alleged “ideology of violence.”

But, remember when the shoe was on the other foot, when Democrats in general, and the Obama Administration in particular, really did inspire actual violence against their political opponents? Let me refresh your memory.

It was 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration and the birth and rapid emergence of the Tea Party movement. Conservatives attended congressional town hall meetings in droves to question and challenge Democrat representatives over their support for Obamacare, “cap and trade,” and other left-wing initiatives. Protesters were vocal, but peaceful. They attended events they were entitled to attend, as members of the public. Embarrassed Democrats tried to rig the audiences by filling the seats with their own stooges before opening the doors to the public. In August of that year, the regime went on a counteroffensive, coordinating verbal attacks designed to demonize citizen dissent. The Democratic National Committee aired a television ad depicting town hall audiences as “angry mobs.” Democrat House leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote an op ed piece in USA Today (which has since been scrubbed from the newspaper’s web site), condemning the protesters and calling them “unAmerican.” Former Sen. Jean Carnahan penned a piece in the left-wing site Fired Up! Missouri in which she characterized Obamacare protesters as “hordes that take up pitchforks,” accusing them of “mob hysteria” and “remarks that border on treason.” Treason! And then things got physical. Channeling then-candidate Obama’s remark the year before , “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” the President’s deputy chief of staff Jim Messina encouraged supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against critics. Less than 24 hours later in south St. Louis County, SEIU members did just that, savagely beating Kenneth Gladney, an independent vendor of patriotic flags and anti-Obamacare buttons, outside a packed town hall meeting of Congressman Russ Carnahan. Another person there assaulted Kelly Owens, a woman with a video camera who was documenting the crimes, breaking the camera when smashing it against Ms. Owens’ face.

Whether or not Trump is the Republican nominee, expect things to get rougher as the campaign proceeds. When Democrats’ control is threatened, they get desperate. And violent.

Ewwwww!

TMI Department: The National Enquirer (which first broke the John Edwards story) quotes an Arkansas state trooper on then-Gov. Clinton’s security detail.

It’s not an image I want before dinner. Maybe it will help me lose weight!

Election returns: What to watch for

The Unablogger

What happens early will probably foretell results for the rest of the night.

The first significant result will be Kentucky. A McConnell win is expected, so if he loses, so have Republicans nationally.

The next significant poll closings (6 p.m. Central) are New Hampshire, Georgia and Virginia. If Michelle Nunn wins Georgia outright without a runoff, Republican hopes for the senate are dashed. Most likely outcome there is a Republican lead below 50%, with final decision deferred until January 6, after Congress convenes.

Good signals for Republicans in these early states include: David Perdue winning Georgia outright without a runoff or a Scott Brown win over Jean Shaheen. A Republican win in the Virginia senate seat would signal a huge Republican wave.

Also, see if the mainstream media even mentions the solid reelection of black South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

6:30 poll closings include West Virginia and North Carolina. Republican failure to capture the Democrat seat in West Virginia probably means the Democrats keep the senate, because West Virginia is supposed to be “in the bag” for Republicans. Republican Thom Tillis upsetting Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina would pretty much assure Republican control of the Senate with a cushion.

Republican senate wins in both New Hampshire and North Carolina probably foreshadow a 10-seat Republican pickup on the night.

Everything else is later. The probable Republican takeover of the Alaska seat probably won’t be confirmed until Wednesday morning.

If isolated states here and there (e.g., Colorado) go Democratic against the wave, it may be a sign of a stolen election, as suggested by my previous post.

Here’s the full list of when the polls close in each state. NOTE: All times are listed in Central Time. States designated by * have multiple closing times, as they include more than one time zone.

5 p.m.
Indiana*
Kentucky*

6 p.m.
Florida*
Georgia
Indiana*
Kentucky*
New Hampshire
South Carolina
Vermont
Virginia

6:30 p.m.
North Carolina
Ohio
West Virginia

7 p.m.
Alabama
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida*
Illinois
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan*
Mississippi
Missouri
New Jersey
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota*
Tennessee
Texas*
Washington, D.C.

7:30 p.m.
Arkansas

8 p.m.
Arizona
Colorado
Kansas*
Louisiana
Michigan*
Minnesota
Nebraska
New Mexico
New York
North Dakota*
South Dakota*
Texas*
Wisconsin
Wyoming

9 p.m.
Idaho*
Iowa
Kansas*
Montana
Nevada
North Dakota*
Oregon*
Utah

10 p.m.
California
Hawaii
Idaho*
North Dakota*
Oregon*
Washington

11 p.m.
Alaska*

Don’t be fooled! Obama will dictate amnesty

The Unablogger

In a high-profile Rose Garden appearance in June, President Obama promised to announce by the end of summer unilateral measures on so-called immigration reform (i.e., amnesty for illegal aliens) if Congress did not enact immigration reform legislation. But this weekend, at the urging of vulnerable Democrat senators and congressmen, the Administration announced that it would delay taking such executive action until after November congressional elections.

The political purpose of the delay is avoid having voters react to the imposition of amnesty in the November mid-term elections. With voters overwhelmingly opposed to amnesty, that reaction would be overwhelmingly against Democratic candidates.

Democrats’ cynical, simplistic theory is that voters won’t be outraged by what hasn’t happened yet on Election Day, and that otherwise unmotivated conservative voters won’t find the urgency to vote in the mid-terms. Obama and his political advisers think voters are too stupid to figure out that his outrageous action on amnesty will still occur anyway, right after the election, when it will be too late for voters to react. That’s what “until after November congressional elections” is all about. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

Conservatives need to make sure that their like-minded friends, relatives and co-workers are aware that Obama plans to impose amnesty by executive order, without approval of Congress, and of the Democrats’ sneaky plan to hide their true intent.

Koster failing on ‘no call list’ enforcement

We are all being barraged by unwanted robocalls. Many of them this time of year are calls about the election, but many others are commercial calls. You know the ones.

“The FBI has noticed an increase in burglaries in your neighborhood!”

“This is an important message about your credit card.” (It really isn’t your credit card company; that’s why they don’t say which card.)

You can probably come up with others; they’ll probably call you today!

We can’t do anything about the political robocalls, because political expression is the very heart of freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. But Missouri and most other states have laws that restrict commercial calls, whether in-person or robocalls. You can place yourself on a “no call” list. Companies are prohibited from calling numbers on the no-call list.

But annoying commercial calls are up in Missouri. The robocall industry knows that they have nothing to w0rry about, because Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster isn’t enforcing the law. Many aren’t even bothering to ask for the list of numbers to avoid calling: requests for the list are down from previous years.

Maybe Koster doesn’t know he’s supposed to do that. His reelection ads suggest that the only part of the job he cares about is prosecuting criminals. He disparages Republican challenger Ed Martin for never having put a single criminal behind bars, which was also true of most of Koster’s predecessors, including Jack Danforth, John Ashcroft and Jay Nixon. Koster might be surprised to learn that his office has other responsibilities, too, like protecting Missouri’s natural resources and agricultural productivity, administering the workers compensation second injury fund (which is going broke under Koster’s watch), enforcing the Missouri Consumer Protection Act and anti-trust laws, enforcing compliance with state laws by trusts, foundations and non-profit corporations, supervising liquidations of charities. And enforcing the no-call list law.

St. Louis economy shrinking under Democrats



The Unablogger

President Barack Obama and his Democratic Congress continue to crow about how the economy is expanding because of their stimulus package. The government’s multi-million dollar website, Recovery.gov, goes into great detail tracing the number of jobs created or “saved” in each congressional district by the stimulus, but their funny numbers take credit for jobs in districts that don’t even exist (e.g., Missouri’s 14th congressional district; we only have 9)! Meanwhile, unemployment (which Obama had claimed the stimulus would keep below 8%) has hit double digits (10.2% to be exact).

There are better measures of how the economy is doing, and St. Louisans are receiving one of them at our homes now. It’s the new AT&T Yellow Pages. It’s thinner, lighter, but the print isn’t any smaller (they already made that change a few years ago). What’s different is that there are fewer businesses to serve us than there were just a year ago.

The paid advertising section has 54 fewer pages, but that depends on how much businesses are willing to spend on advertising. In hard economic times, some businesses actually increase their advertising in a desperate attempt to take business away from their competitors.

A better measure of the number of businesses serving us is the white business pages, which used to be part of the white pages but are now in the Yellow Pages. These pages declined from 259 in the December, 2008 edition to 238 in the new December, 2009 version. That’s a drop of over 8% in approximately the one-year period since Obama was elected president.

So, what’s happening? There is a common thread of who’s in charge. The City of St. Louis is governed by Mayor Francis Slay, the latest in an uninterrupted 60-year string of Democrat mayors, and a board of aldermen (counting its presiding officer) with a 28-1 Democrat majority. St. Louis County is governed by Charlie Dooley, the latest in a 23-year string of Democrat county executives, and a county council with a 5-2 Democrat majority. Missouri is back under the control of a Democrat governor (Jeremiah W. Nixon V), and the United States is governed by President Obama and large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

When a business tanks, the directors dump the CEO. It’s time that voters did the same to their elected officials.

Socialists validate Right’s claims of Medicare cuts

The Unablogger

It’s not just tea party people and Republicans who are complaining about how Obamacare pays for itself on the backs of Medicare patients. While the main stream media may discount The Right’s claims because they are made by The Right, another source said the same thing today, a source with much more credibility with the main stream media: the World Socialist Web Site.

The site published an article by regular contributor Kate Randall, citing a report by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services stating that the House-passed universal health care bill (H.R. 3962) includes more than $570 billion in cuts to the Medicare program for the elderly. That’s about half the entire tab for the bill. The study found that these deep cuts to Medicare “would likely result in real reductions in care, resulting in some hospitals and nursing homes refusing Medicare patients altogether.”

Ms. Randall notes that the bill’s ” permanent annual productivity adjustments to price updates” for acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies would account for $282 billion of the alleged cost savings. The CMMS report states that this provision would cause Medicare payment rates to grow more slowly than health care providers’ costs of providing services to Medicare beneficiaries. This in turn would cause providers to reduce care provided under Medicare or pull out of Medicare altogether. Ms. Randall concluded that this so-called efficiency measure “would have the real effect of denying access to millions of seniors seeking health care.”

The Left and Right agree: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s health care bill should not become law.

‘House call’ protest in St. Louis

You’d never know it by relying on the main stream media, but over 200 patriotic citizens protested the proposed Obamacare bill at the Brentwood office of Rep. “Prince” Russ Carnahan (D-MO). It was St. Louis’ expression of the House Call protest in the nation’s capital led by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN).

The St. Louis event was notable as a “common man” event. I didn’t see any politicians there running to the front to take credit. I didn’t see any of the usual local tea party stars, like Bill Hennessy, Dana Loesch, Michele Moore. These were all just ordinary folks, expressing their frustration over Congress’ relentless march to approve a 2000+ page bill that none of them have read and that a majority of voters oppose.

One notable blogger who was there documenting what happened was Adam Sharp. You can see his video of the event here.

Bye-bye, Medicare. Hello, QALYs!



The Unablogger

As I blogged earlier, the proposed “universal health care” plans now pending in Congress, if adopted, will replace Medicare. The new plan will provide seniors with much less health care than they get now under Medicare.

But where seniors will really get ripped is in the rationing decisions based on “comparative effectiveness research” which will discriminate against older patients. This discrimination will not be mere happenstance, but by design. Comparative effectiveness will require the bureaucrats who decide a patient’s treatment to evaluate all care based on “quality-adjusted life years” (QALYs). That means that the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years that the patient is likely to benefit. The older the patient, the fewer QALYs the patient has to justify the expense, resulting in a higher cost rating and therefore a lower likelihood the treatment will be approved.

But will that really be what happens? This system is already in place in Britain, where that formula regularly denies treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients. And it’s coming soon to a doctor’s office near you.

If you’re having a hard time finding “comparative effectiveness research” in the proposed bill, there’s a reason. Congress and the Administration hid that provision in a different bill. Worse yet, that bill is the Obama stimulus bill that is already law, the bill that nobody read before they voted for it! Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) and Congressmen Lacy Clay (D) and Russ Carnahan (D) all voted for it. Sen. Kit Bond (R) and Rep. Todd Akin (R) voted no.

And just to reinforce the point for those who don’t get it, the new government health plan will increase one service to seniors: “end of life” counseling.

Under Obamacare, old people just have a duty to die!