Jeff goes on, elsewhere:

The proposed $35 billion expansion of the SCHIP was crafted and pushed extremely hard by Congressional Democrats seeking to expand federally funded health care and to score political points against Republicans, whom Democrat leaders thought to be vulnerable on health care issues. However, when House Democratic leaders responded to President Bushs second veto of the SCHIP expansion plan by scheduling the vote to override or sustain Bushs action for January 23 six weeks from the December 12 veto rather than calling for immediate action (their only other choice according to House rules), failure on the proposed expansion became all but a foregone conclusion. Republicans will stick together andwill sustain President’s veto, a highly-placed House staffer told me shortly after the President Bush sent the SCHIP legislation back to Congress. We’ll have enough votes for that.

Realizing that they again would not be able to raise enough votes to override Bushs veto even given six weeks to lobby Republicans perceived to be vulnerable on the issue to switch sides Congressional Democrats ended their vigorous attempt to expand SCHIP. In the end, instead of expanding the program by $35 billion, Congress simply voted to extend SCHIP in its current form once again. However, unlike previous extensions, which were purposely brief so as to keep the issue on the front burner in Congress and in the media, this time the program was extended for sixteen months a move which clearly demonstrated the majoritys unwillingness to further address the issue within the current Congress or with the current administration.

Meanwhile, NPR has a different take:

Democrats had little choice in the matter. With Christmas fast approaching, they were in a fix. They had two health funding emergencies. First, temporary funding for SCHIP whose authorization technically expired Oct. 1 was about to run out once again. Second, on Jan. 1, a 10 percent cut in pay to doctors under Medicare was set to take effect something Democrats, Republicans and the Bush administration agree shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

But President Bush and Republicans had nixed most of the ways Democrats wanted to pay for either the Medicare changes or the SCHIP expansion. That basically gave Republicans the upper hand, and left the majority Democrats with little more to do than fume.

[blather about class warfare by Pete Stark snipped]

And, adding insult to injury, Republicans insisted on continuing SCHIP at its current funding levels not just until September as Democrats had wanted but until March 2009, four months after the November 2008 elections.

Expect that last bit to become the Official Rationale for all of this: the Establishment Democrats no doubt hope that everyone who might be upset about the extension will be so busy thinking evil thoughts about how the GOP forced the poor, innocent Democrats to lock in the program at current funding past 2008 that they’ll completely forget to ask why the Democrats let the GOP get away with so extensively defining the extent of the latter’s victory. The answer is, of course, that this really was all politics all along: and the politics no longer support pushing this issue too strongly. So… the Democrats retreated. Why not? They had no real emotional involvement in the dispute anyway.

Oh. Did I just write that out? My bad.

Moe

*Yes, I know that it’s probably just a end-of-fiscal quarter thing, that’s all.

What is this alliance? Well, according to the article, it consists of complimenting each other while Romney loads mailboxes with negativity. This alliance is called “one of the stranger story lines to emerge in the Republican race” because McCain evidently hates evangelicals, according to the piece, and Huckabee portrays himself as one. But if the alliance is having an effect, it is having the one desired by the Huckabee and the McCain camps.

However, Romney spokesman Kevin Madden has a spin:

“Their strategies are emblematic of their fundamental weaknesses, while ours points to our strength of message and resources across the board.”

The resources cannot be denied, and they call for large wins in both early States, but the message? To a large extent, for the past several weeks, Romney’s message in Iowa is a negative, anti-Huckabee one. Huckabee has little money.

Now, I have always held that because of the compressed and truncated reality and feel of this year’s nominating process, Iowa and New Hampshire are not as important as they perhaps had been historically, although there will be psychological “bragging rights.” And to Mitt Romney, because of the way he targeted and focused his campaign, these two contests are important. To the rest, a star could be born.

As a Reagan conservative with libertarian leanings, I’ve found myself hoping beyond hope for Fred Thompson to appear out of nowhere and do something; and we can never count Rudy out unless he fails in Florida on January 29 and falls victim to the tsunami of February 5. But one wonders if this is all leading to a McCain-Huckabee ticket.

Hold your enthusiasm for this for just a second. McCain-Huckabee could knock of a Dem ticket headed by Hillary if, when push comes to shove, enough people are frightened enough by the prospects of at least another four years but this time with the nasty one in charge.

“Johnny and Mike are sittin’ in a tree.”

Let’s see how this one plays out.

We tend to forget that, while Senator Obama has almost no national experience in politics, he has cemented his relationship with the Illinois Democratic Party (it would be cruel of me to say that he has been successfully co-opted by the Illinois Democratic Party). This won’t magically give him campaigning ability, but has it taught him a trick or two about how to manage one’s primary political opposition? It’s an interesting question, if one that we are unlikely to have asked until he stops being the official Fresh-Faced Outsider Who Is Shaking Up The Race And Engaging Ordinary People for 2008. I do know that if a Republican Senator had found himself in a situation where his stance on a particular nomination just happened to negatively impact his immediate primary rival we wouldn’t be able to move for all the accusations of Rovian plots, but that’s just my VRWC cynicism talking, no doubt.

Still, if he has set things up this way, I must admit to being at least slightly impressed. It’s precisely the sort of outstretched foot-in-one’s-path that the old Daley machine would have delighted in.

Let me give you one other quote from the article:

Nitzan’s paper did, however, give much space to the explanation that the Israeli soldiers refrained from rape out of demographic considerations.
[Bolding mine]

How fortunate are we to have people happy to explain to us how men not acting like beasts is proof that they were acting like even worse beasts all along…

Moe

PS: Yes, we here at RedState are aware of the news that Maryscott O’Connor’s site has apparently come quite the Jew-hating hangout; it’s just that, unlike the (honestly) distressed folks over at dKos, we’re not particularly surprised that it happened.

*For those of you fortunate enough not to be English majors (unlike, say, myself**), literary deconstruction is the process by which a particular text’s message is manipulated, adjusted, reinterpreted, folded, spindled, and mutilated until it matches the personal opinion of whoever it is that’s grading your term paper.

**Actually, being a supermarket cashier isn’t entirely a horrible job for somebody just graduating from college. You just have to get the overnight shift, which means that you get to read a lot.