“The President still has failed to come out and distance himself from ACORN,” she said. “And also he hasn’t come out and said yes, he believes that we need to defund them.”

Bachmann endorsed an independent investigation (or eight) of the group, due to potential Democratic bias. “If this was a Republican organization…, trust me, they’d be dead by now,” she said, adding that the central question is, “Was taxpayer money ever used — commingled, taken as a fungible good from one aspect of ACORN or another — to elect Democrats?”

Video after the jump:

How about a novel approach at this particular point in time – give the Commander in Chief, the National Command Authority, State… and most importantly, the Commanding General and his staff in Afghanistan some efing breathing room to sort this out? The guys on the ground – get it?

Dilegge goes on to wonder whether the proliferation of defense- and region-focused blogs and other media have “really examined the tipping point – the place where we become part of the problem, rather than the solution.” A worthy question. But how would that be determined? And how does a defense-focused blog not focus on a major war, or write about it critically?

WordPress.com isn’t a news site. It’s the launch page for WordPress blogging software. And while it’s possible that some blog used the phrase “Obama loses 2.19 million jobs” in the last month, a search for that phrase on WordPress blogs and via Google comes up empty.

This sort of stuff is a bipartisan problem; Terry McAuliffe inverted the meaning of a quote in his final ad during his failed bid for governor of Virginia. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s strange.

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Get on the phone ASAP. The vote has not happened and it looks like it won’t until next week. Why? Because we are bringing pressure to bear and the Democrats are having a very hard time keeping a majority on the legislation.

We absolutely cannot falter on this. We must keep up the continuous pressure headed into the weekend. See the list of names below and call, call, call.

We should not be bailing out European national banks. We are less than a dozen votes away from being able to kill this. Call these members of Congress ASAP.

RedState and Firedoglake, working together – total insanity.

When I was in college, I studied Southern Long Fist Kung Fu for more than a year and my teacher told me something that I never forgot.

I’d like to think that the F. Scott Fitzgerald rip is intentional. Sadly, the rest of the column is a call for conservative bloggers to “do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber,” as if Palin and Wurzelbacher were shrinking violets who did not embrace their statuses as public figures.

- Tom Swan, who managed Ned Lamont’s 2006 Senate campaign.

- Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, who you used to see at every liberal event pushing for the impeachment of former President George W. Bush.

- Paul Hogarth of BeyondChron.

- Todd Beeton of MyDD.com.

- John Arovosis of AmericaBlog.com.

So some of the people you’d expect to join this, but not really a landslide of anti-Specter sentiment. I can think of dozens of prominent progressives who have not joined this particular cause.

Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

One thing I left on the cutting room floor, but tried to imply with some context and references, was just how comfortable Johnson was back in 2004, 2005 and 2006 with the people he is now crusading against.

It made sense, and to an extent it was the function of the “everybody on board” mentality that gripped the political blogospheres before the collapse of the Bush presidency. But it’s striking reading Johnson’s old posts now. From November 9, 2004, reacting to the banning of far-right Dutch Belgian party Vlaams Blok:

While it’s hard to approve of every one of Vlaams Blok’s policies, there’s also no denying that this is very much a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups such as the openly radical, terror-supporting Arab-European League—because almost no one else opposes them.

From February 11, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs is a year old today! Happy blogoversary, Pamela.

From July 17, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs has great coverage and lots of photographs of the Stand With Israel Rally in New York City.

From November 18, 2007:

Tonight’s recommended book is Robert Spencer’s detailed, relentlessly factual comparison of Islam and Christianity, examining the history and the ideologies behind the question: Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.

UPDATE: Johnson links, and points out one error (which I’ve corrected) while arguing that his friendly comments about some people he’s now shunned were “from a different time” and fairly innocuous. All the same, it’s interesting to read those old posts and get a sense of how much that side of the blogosphere has changed.

I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which [Little Green Footballs' Charles] Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.

He did say this, but he added the caveat that there are Christian activists who want to institute Biblical law through legal means, and who are extreme, but not terrorists.

The people they invoke are the Christian reconstructionists like [R.J.] Rushdooney, but if you read them they’re open about their agenda. It’s not secret. And they say that they want to bring back Biblical law using Constitutional means.

I didn’t want to get into the weeds on this tangential issue, so I cut this, but it’s important to note that Spencer acknowledges the existence of these sorts of fringe Christian activists.

President Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief of the US armed forces. I certainly don’t agree with a lot of his policies, but I’ll be damned if I won’t — at the very least — respect the office and give him congratulations when it’s deserved. And when the US military succeeds in a critical mission, the CinC deserves congratulations.

There is way too much mean-spiritedness in modern politics, and I for one am totally sick of it. And disappointed in those few LGF lizards who can’t find it in themselves to be gracious and say, “Well done.”

Take a step back from the brink, folks. Oppose Obama’s policies all you like, but be the loyal opposition, not a bunch of ranting haters. The Internet already has more than enough of those.

Johnson, who runs the most successful terror-watching blog, has been buffeted by fringe criticism over his occasional statements of support for the president’s foreign policy.

Pelosi’s plan wastes hundreds of millions on programs that won’t help the economy: smoking cessation, arts funding, treatment for STDs.

Arts funding did make it into the bill that President Obama signed, as did smoking cessation. But the $335 million included in the House’s first version of the stimulus package, passed on January 29, was stripped out in the Senate. If it was once part of “Pelosi’s plan,” it no longer is, because it no longer exists.

The argument that arts funding “won’t help the economy” is controversial, too, but controversial is better than outright false.