Ryan did not vote for Speaker this morning, nor did Webster, but Nancy Pelosi voted . . . for herself!

Outgoing Speaker Boehner voted for Ryan.

The Roll Call is here.

The only Democrat not voting was Meeks.

The Blue Dog Democrat Cooper who got one vote to be the new Speaker was the guy who voted for Colin Powell! Being a good guy, unlike Pelosi, Cooper had to vote for someone other than himself, so Colin Powell it was. And it sure as hell wasn't going to be Pelosi now was it?

Freedom Caucus caves, Paul Ryan elected Speaker of the House

Ryan received 236 votes for the Speakership on the floor of the House this morning, Nancy Pelosi 184. 432 votes out of 435 were cast. I'm assuming Boehner, Pelosi and Ryan didn't vote.

The Republican Caucus in the House numbers 247 in the 114th Congress. The Democrats 188.

Story here.

45 Republicans voted against Ryan yesterday in caucus, but today Florida Republican Dan Webster received just 9 votes of the 12 cast for candidates other than Ryan and Pelosi (Webster voted for himself?).

Blue Dog Democrat Jim Cooper (TN), Democrat John Lewis (GA) and Colin Powell (!) each received one vote.

Rand Paul's warped view of unfunded liabilities

"Your grandparents had too many kids."

No Rand, we didn't have enough.

Libertarian moron.

Huge flip-flop tonight by Ben Carson on oil subsidies and ethanol

Said he was wrong to propose taking away oil subsidies to support others, never mentioning he originally meant Iowans and their ethanol back in April. Now he's supposedly against helping any industry.

So Carson finally gets ahead in the polls in Iowa pledging to boost ethanol at big oil's expense and then throws Iowa under the bus.

Breathtaking. The guy's a liberal at heart. 

Paul Ryan, who voted for CROMNIBUS, is just fine with the budget deal and the cowardly Freedom Caucus will still support him for Speaker

Paul Ryan, quoted in Politico, here:

"[U]nder new management we are not going to do the people's business this way. We are up against a deadline — that's unfortunate. But going forward we can't do the people's business (this way). As a conference we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward."

Sure, sure Paul. It'll be business as usual under you, too.

To Paul Ryan, conservatism means preserving Medicare for future generations, no going back on gays in the military, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

Under Paul Ryan's "conservatism", if you lose, nothing will EVER be rolled back. And that includes the spending.

His expressions of outrage are simply red meat thrown to his Neanderthals.

JUST WORDS!

Ben Carson used tissue from aborted fetuses in medical research

Politico had all the gory details of Ben Carson's very complicated anti-abortion position here in August.

Carson extends lead in Iowa to national lead in CBS/NYT poll to +4 over Trump, whose average lead tightens to +4.8

Gallup says Tea Party support hits low of 17%, peak support was in November 2010 at 32%

Polling results here.

The unending fascination of Sarah Palin for little Democrat minds

Dunderhead Democrat Party hack William Daley is stuck on stupid.

Here he is in full flutter in WaPo, like a moth drawn to a lightbulb, typing "The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin". It proves nothing but that it takes a dunderhead to know a dunderhead. The GOP has failed, he says, to distance itself from this simpleton who flunked Newspapers 101, and her ilk. Reading it one wonders when Democrats will distance themselves from ignoramuses like Bill Daley, but then you realize they're all ignoramuses. Where would they go?

Certainly not Chicago.  

Bill Daley, it must remembered, comes from the same Democrat family which presided over the decades long ruination of the finances of that once great city, and with it of the state. The place is now so bankrupt it can't even pay lottery winners. Those who can flee the state, do. Illinois ranks first in America for out-migration in 2014. These nincompoop Daleys are the same people who seriously thought they could afford to host the Summer Olympics next year, forgetting how all those $100,000+ pensions for unionized teachers can really add up. As it is Chicago's bonds have this year achieved junk status, despite the highest sales taxes in the nation and the highest property taxes of any state, save New Jersey. The place is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of perennially spendthrift Democrats.

In charge of the Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton, Bill Daley long ago proved his own incompetence. The man couldn't even manage to find a staffer at the Bureau of Economic Analysis to give him the correct figure for year 1900 gross domestic product in a 1999 speech commemorating the invention of the metric under FDR. Daley was only off by an order of magnitude and fifty years at the time, saying the year 1900 $20 billion economy was actually $300 billion in size, a level which it did not reach . . . until 1950! Bill Daley only ran the place. You'd think he could at least get its monthly claim to headline fame right.

But Democrats have good reason to forget the size of things, especially GDP. After all under them it took eleven long years to restore the 1929 $100 billion economy back to its size, in 1940. And presently the chief Democrat holding a veto pen in one hand and a copy of Rules for Radicals in the other is on schedule to produce the very worst GDP record since that Great Depression.

At least Sarah Palin has learned a few things along the way since her quixotic candidacy, for example rejecting the appropriateness of bailouts and crony capitalism. Democrats on the other hand have learned nothing, and only keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

She's YUGE!

Big mistake: Donald Trump says he's 100% in favor of ethanol

The Donald, quoted here on September 22nd:

'Trump said that he supports the RFS at Iowa’s Faith and Freedom Forum, “I am totally in favor of ethanol, 100 percent.” This is the first time Trump gave his stance on the topic publicly.'

So far this only amounts to Trump supporting the current Renewable Fuel Standard signed into law by George W. Bush in 2005, but that's still bad policy. Ethanol is inefficient as a fuel, bad for engines and does zero to reduce carbon emissions. It diverts corn from animal feed, driving up the cost of food supplies from beef, pork and poultry, and from corn added to other products. Ethanol also makes it more lucrative to put more and more land into corn production than would otherwise be the case, potentially stressing the environment.

Arguably Ben Carson's success in Iowa over Trump in part has to do with Carson's pledge to push for 30% ethanol fuel blends, a tripling of the current standard.

The crony capitalism involved with ethanol is YUGE, making Iowa more important politically than it otherwise would be were it not for federal gasoline dictates:

"Iowa produces nearly one-third of the nation’s ethanol and nearly half of Iowa’s corn goes into ethanol production, according to the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

"Iowa’s renewable fuels industry, which includes biodiesel production, supports 47,000 jobs and accounts for $5 billion of the state’s gross domestic product, according to the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association."

That's about 3.2% of 2014 Iowa GDP.

Nebraska estimates Iowa production capacity at 25% of the nation's capability, ahead of Nebraska in second at 13%. Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and South Dakota round out the top six, who all exceed the 1 billion gallon level of capacity per year. At 10.8 billion gallons of available capacity, the top six states produce almost as much as they can at 10.6 billion gallons, over 70% of total national production.

A number of the current crop of Republicans running for president is more or less opposed to ethanol:

"Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former New York Gov. George Pataki and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have all expressed interest in eliminating or phasing out the ethanol mandate that requires a certain percentage of ethanol in transportation fuel."

Trump's position may reflect a conviction that he generally needs to be supportive of ethanol in these states to win them in the general election even though it appears Carson has outbid him in the primary season.

Maureen Dowd names Hillary the Valkyrie of Libya intervention, accuses her of negligence

Here, still pining for Joe:

'When you are the Valkyrie who engineers the intervention, you can’t then say it is beneath you to pay attention to the ludicrously negligent security for your handpicked choice for ambassador in a lawless country full of assassinations and jihadist training camps. ... [T]here were 600 requests from J. Christopher Stevens’s team to upgrade security in Benghazi in 2012 and 20 attacks on the mission compound in the months before the Sept. 11 siege. ...There were no call logs of talks between Stevens and Clinton, and she said she could not remember if she ever spoke to him again after she swore him in in May. “I was the boss of ambassadors in 270 countries,” she explained. But Libya was the country where she was the midwife to chaos. And she should have watched that baby like the Lady Hawk she is.'

But of course the Valkyrs picked who should die in battle, and who should live. In addition to picking Gaddafi, Hillary also picked four Americans.

Trump doesn't get why Carson is ahead in Iowa citing religion when it's support for ethanol giving Carson the leg up

Trump, quoted here:

'“I love Iowa, and I honestly believe those polls are wrong,” he said. “I’m a Presbyterian, I’m a great Christian.”'

Forty percent of Iowa corn gets diverted to ethanol production, without which food prices would drop as feed prices normalize. All of which would mean harder times for Iowans.

Carson wants to add ethanol infrastructure and increase its share in gasoline to 30% instead of the current 10%:

'“Therefore, I would probably be in favor of taking that $4 billion a year we spend on oil subsidies and using that in new fueling stations" for 30 percent ethanol blends, he added.'

If Trump were smart he would exploit the unpopularity of ethanol with the American people revealed in polling to marginalize Carson nationally on the issue, but that will never sway Iowa voters tied to ethanol for their livelihood, sort of like preaching against gambling in Vegas.

Trump can afford to lose Iowa, and probably will.

He should move on.

Obama Injustice Department closes IRS investigation without bringing charges against anyone

Reported here:

'"We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution," the letter [to Congress] stated.'

Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand the number one reason Ben Carson is doing so well in Iowa

Ethanol.

Crony capitalism in nutty Iowa: Nearly 40% of Iowa's corn ends up as ethanol, not feed, driving up food and fuel costs

Since 2010-2011, Iowa has produced an average of 12.7 billion bushels of corn, with an average of 5 billion bushels going to ethanol production, as reported here.

It is estimated food prices would fall 13% by repealing the Renewable Fuel Standard signed by George W. Bush in 2005. Ethanol also reduces MPG by 25%, is bad for engines and does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

Republicans should kill ethanol! 

45 minutes after blaming Benghazi on a video, Hillary e-mailed Chelsea to say it was terrorism

"YOU LIE!"

She lies like a rug, like the rest of Obama's vermin.

Kim Strassel lays it all out, here:

'At 10:30 on the night of the attack, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement about the violence, blaming the video. ... Here’s what the Benghazi committee found in Thursday’s hearing. Two hours into Mrs. Clinton’s testimony, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan referred to an email Mrs. Clinton sent to her daughter, Chelsea, at 11:12 the night of the attack, or 45 minutes after the secretary of state had issued a statement blaming YouTube-inflamed mobs. Her email reads: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group.” Mrs. Clinton doesn’t hedge in the email; no “it seems” or “it appears.” She tells her daughter that on the anniversary of 9/11 an al Qaeda group assassinated four Americans. ... The next afternoon, Mrs. Clinton had a call with the Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. The notes from it are absolutely damning. The secretary of state tells him: “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack—not a protest.” And yet Mrs. Clinton, and Ms. Rice and Mr. Obama for days and days continued to spin the video lie.'

Recent Republicans who won the Iowa caucus but not the presidency

Gerald Ford, 1976

GHW Bush, 1980

Bob Dole, 1988

GHW Bush, 1992

Bob Dole, 1996

Mike Huckabee, 2008

Rick Santorum, 2012

Boston Herald bloviates against Trump, defends Bush for DHS, DNI and Patriot Act

Here:

“The FBI and the CIA and various agencies were not talking to each other,” Trump said. They didn’t like each other, they were jealous of each other, and a lot of things skipped through.”

All true. But who was the one man to successfully tackle that problem, to propose and get passed legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security, a director of National Intelligence, the Patriot Act?

That would be George W. Bush.

Oh yeah, creating another huge, unwieldy and costly bureaucracy which is unanswerable to the public, spies on its citizens, routinely lies to Congress and botched Hurricane Katrina response was a real resume enhancer for George W. Bush.

Jim Webb abandons ship, Joe Biden abandons ship . . .

. . . it's all on Hillary to scuttle now.