Heartbreak: CodePink Just Can't Get Enough Attention

You have to shake your head and wonder what planet the Associated Press is living on. Here we have a ragtag group of wild-eyed Marxist radicals who get a nonstop stream of favorable media coverage and now the AP laments the fact they're not getting enough attention.

So what do they do: They devote 18 paragraphs of fawning coverage to the psychos.

These are hard times for peace activists. Despite CodePink's flashy costumes and willingness to disrupt campaign events and congressional hearings — sometimes facing arrest for it — the women are finding it more difficult to maintain public attention on the Iraq war.

Americans are now focused more on the gasoline prices they're paying, declining values of their homes and other economic issues. The ups and downs in a highly contested presidential election also have edged Iraq off the front page and evening newscasts most days.

Actually, it was the overwhelming success of the surge that edged Iraq off the front age, but I digress.

"We do feel to some extent that these elections have sabotaged our peace actions and messaging because ... the media is completely focused on the two candidates," said CodePink activist Liz Hourican, who moved here from Arizona a year and a half ago to devote her time to ending the war. "It's a lot more challenging."

And while Iraqi and American officials are discussing a pullout of U.S. combat troops from major Iraqi cities by next June and a broader withdrawal by 2011, CodePink members say they won't be satisfied until all U.S. forces are back from Iraq. "We'd like a timeline that is shorter," said co-founder Medea Benjamin.

Congress' decision this summer to fund U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year with $162 billion was a setback, but CodePink already was on the campaign trail, "bird-dogging" presidential candidates and unfurling anti-war banners at their events.

Republican John McCain is a favorite target. "Just about every place McCain goes, we have somebody confronting him," Benjamin said. "We want the undecided voters ... to see we associate McCain with more war and with the failed Bush policy, and, of course, we want the media to cover it."

The activists' campaign on Capitol Hill didn't stop. Before Congress left for recess, the women in their pink outfits scoured the halls almost daily. They seated themselves behind witnesses at hearings unrelated to the war, flashing pink anti-war posters at TV cameras recording, for example, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke talking about the collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns.

"There's a lot of very creative people in the group," Hourican said. "They make so many different crafty, visually brilliant things, and they love using their talents to push this along and see their costume on the news."

Yup, just incredibly difficult to get themselves noticed, but fortunately they have the media in their back pockets.

CodePink Hag Can't Find a Cop, Calls for Help From the Marines

You just can't make this stuff up.

This despicable, vile, Marxist douchebag Medea Benjamin, who runs around publicly fellating Hugo Chavez and bashing the United States every chance she gets, has the gall to call for help from the Marines when she encounters a little problem.

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who can turn the air blue when shouting chants against American Marines called out for the Marines in front of Marine Recruiting offices in Berkeley yesterday.

Eamon Kelley, the young Marine who is featured in Move America Forward’s TV commercial that ran on Fox News earlier this week, could hardly believe his own ears when Benjamin called on the Marines for help.

Kelley, who is recovering from back surgery, spent his day in Berkeley, where CodePink continues with Berkeley council’s blessing, to keep a virtual blockade at the recruit center, expanding its efforts to harass American troops and to turn back any young Americans looking to enlist.

City Council stubbornly refuses to apologize and continues to subsidize free parking for CodePink to drive soldiers out of town.

“While we were at the protest in Berkeley from 12 to 4 p.m., a white Volvo drove by and a man spat upon CodePink,” Kelley wrote in an email to MAF’s Melanie Morgan. “They chased him down the street and got into a verbal altercation. The police were NOWHERE in sight.

“That’s not the best part, ready for this?

“Medea Benjamin yelled and I quote “Marines!” She actually yelled for our help because this man had stepped out of his car. I even asked her if she was yelling Police and she told me, “I said Marines” then put her arm around my friend Allen (the Marine Vet). Ironic?”

Benjamin, who turned on her former close friend, San Francisco Bay Area activist Maria Ruzicka, later killed in Iraq in a widely-publicized suicide bombing, over Ruzicka’s decision to work with the U.S. military to secure compensation for the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, is on the record for supporting Cuba and Venezuela.

“Benjamin has drawn conservative criticism for her support of Hugo Chavez and her attacks on the U.S. embargo of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Conservative writer David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag has attacked her as “a long-time Castro acolyte.” .

“Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature. The Washington “peace” rally at which she spoke last month, for instance, was organized by the Workers World Party, a Communist organization…In years past, she staunchly opposed US military and to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America…She favors the creation of a government-sponsored universal health care system funded by taxpayer dollars. She exhorts the US government to lift its trade embargo against Cuba—a nation she notably lauds as a place where people have managed to “thrive despite the odds against them.”

Typical of these leftist swine. They spit on the Marines, yet call for their help when someone returns the favor.

H/T Killian Bundy.

Harry Reid's Bloody Hands

Harry Reid seems quite determined to drive over the cliff and take his party with him. While I'm all for the Democrats self-destructing, by denying the troops the necessary funds for the war, he's endangering both their lives and ours. If the Democrats are so naive to think our enemies will just lay down their arms if we bug out of Iraq, they're even more dangerous that I ever imagined.

To be sure, Reid won't risk calling for an immediate pullout. He cautioned his party's bug-out-now wing to be patient, despite "the restlessness" of those who "voted for change in November [and] anticipated dramatic and immediate results in January."

The problem, said Reid, is that "George W. Bush is still the commander-in-chief - and this is his war."

And there's the real problem: From the start, Reid and the Democrats have seen the war in Iraq as a partisan opportunity.

They refuse to present a unified front to the rest of the world - especially to America's enemies - because, in their pinched view, to do so would be to weaken their own prospects for retaking the White House in 2008.

No, Reid didn't repeat his declaration of defeat during yesterday's speech from the Senate floor.

It probably has dawned on him just how big a political blunder he committed - witness Sen. Chuck Schumer's gentle contradiction of the majority leader over the weekend, insisting that "the war is not lost."

Meanwhile, Michael Barone examines the quandary the Democrats find themselves in, having to deal with the lunatics like CodePink while trying to straddle the fine line of public opinion: pandering to those who want out while not wanting to be blamed for cutting off funding. Good luck with that.

We witness here a division in the Democratic Party -- its politicians and its voters -- we have seen ever since military action started to be considered in 2002. Then, most House Democrats voted against the Iraq war resolution, most Senate Democrats for it. The lineup today is not necessarily the same: Mr. Levin, who voted against the war resolution, insists the troops must be funded; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who voted for the war resolution and said last November that of course the troops will be funded, now says he's for Sen. Russ Feingold's March 2008 deadline.

What's curious is that congressional Democrats don't seem much interested in what is actually happening in Iraq. The commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, returns to Washington this week, but last week Mrs. Pelosi's office said "scheduling conflicts" prevented him from briefing House members. Two days later, the members-only meeting was scheduled, but that brings to mind the fact Mrs. Pelosi and other top House Democrats skipped a March 8 Pentagon videoconference with Gen. Petraeus.

How long this fight will go on is unclear. Some Democrats predict it will continue for months. But their dilemma remains the same. They want to be seen as acting to end the war. But they dare not be seen as not funding the troops.

Check out AJ Strata for more.

UPDATE: Hard to fathom, but Reid is getting dumber by the day. Check out the latest at Hot Air. More also at Michelle Malkin, Riehl World View, Protein Wisdom, Jules Crittenden.

Democrats Under Siege

The networks won't be reporting much of this, but it's fun to watch the Democrats unraveling.

GOP Forces House Democrats To Pull DC Voting Bill (Via Drudge)

House Democrats pulled a bill to grant voting rights to Washington, D.C., after Republicans offered a motion that would repeal the gun ban for the District.

The move is a clear signal that Democrats have lost control of the House floor on the voting rights issue after minority Republicans presented the Democratic majority with a politically unpalatable motion that their conservative members would be forced to support for fear of angering the gun rights community.

Fifty-two Democrats voted with Republicans on a similar measure to repeal the gun ban in 2004. That would be more than enough support for Republicans to add a repeal to the voting rights bill - something a majority of Democrats would vehemently oppose.

Republicans have taken great pride in offering motions to recommit during their time in the minority, an often over-looked legislative procedure that has allowed them to amend various bills on the House floor.

Meanwhile, the Communist hags from Codepink, who recently camped outside Nancy Pelosi's home, now plan to invade her office. Doesn't this idiot have any security?

Allahpundit seems to be enjoying things.