The State Prison Mess

Debra Saunders takes a look at how California's Democrats want to save some money.

It's true, California prisons are officially overcrowded and running at 190 percent capacity. But that's only because 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell and single bunks in dormitories.

Earlier this month, three federal judges -- Stephen Reinhardt, Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson -- ordered the release of more than 40,000 of California's 160,000 inmates. No lie: They claimed that releasing one-quarter of state inmates would not have "a meaningful adverse impact on public safety."

They also wrote, "Evidence shows that mentally ill inmates who are released do not, by virtue of their mental illness, present any higher risk than other released inmates."

These three must live in an alternate universe -- one where a quarter of California inmates, many of them mentally ill, can be freed and no one gets hurt in a meaningful way.

It helps if you ignore the fact that California's violent crimes have fallen by about a third since California passed "three strikes" legislation in 1994 -- as the inmate population grew by 50,000.

As for the judges' contention that the state can release mentally ill inmates to no ill effect on public safety: All I can say is that it helps if you don't read a 2008 report commissioned by the Department of Justice on the California parole system. It found that parolees with a record of mental health problems have a 52 percent higher risk of committing the most serious violent offenses than other inmates.

Those who argue for releasing tens of thousands of prisoners may style themselves as realists, but they live in a dream world.

As I write this, scolds have been bashing Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista, because she reportedly pared back legislation to shave $1.2 billion from the state prison budget. The bill passed 21-19 in the Senate. It's part of follow-up legislation on the budget deal enacted with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bass is expected to offer a separate bill to create a Sentencing Commission to reduce the prison population. That plan, Sentencing Commission supporters argue, may kill it -- not because of opposition from the frequently vilified GOP, but because 16 Assembly Dems are running for higher office and do not want to appear soft on crime by voting for a commission. (Bass spokesperson Shannon Murphy, by the way, insists that Bass wants a commission.)

Here's the thing: A Sentencing Commission doesn't have anything to do with the budget bill, as its creation would not save the state a dime in the next two years.

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A “Lost” Fact in the “Rathergate” Mess

Bernie Goldberg revisits the reporting lie that brought CBS to its knees...

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

What seems like a long, long time ago Dan Rather was a very powerful force in American journalism. He not only was the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, he was also the face of the network’s renowned news division — the “Tiffany” network of bigger-than-life legends like Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Mike Wallace and many, many others.

That was then. Now Dan Rather is suing the network that employed him for 44 years, asking for $70 million dollars in damages. Technically, the lawsuit is about a dry legal issue — breach of contract. But it is also about something much more personal to Rather: his legacy. It is a lawsuit, fundamentally, about saving Dan Rather’s reputation.

That reputation took a turn for the worse back in 2004. As has been widely reported, just 55 days before a very close presidential election, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes put a story on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes that brought on the media equivalent of World War III. There were accusations that Rather, Mapes, and maybe the entire CBS News Division had set out to deliberately destroy George W. Bush and get John Kerry elected President of the United States – a charge everyone at CBS vehemently denies.

The story was about how the young George Bush got preferential treatment during the Vietnam War; how he wangled his way into the Texas Air National Guard back in the 1960s to avoid service in Vietnam; and how he was able to do it because his father was a big-shot, a United States Congressman from Houston. The story portrayed the Bush as a slacker. Others have said it portrayed him as a “cowardly draft dodger.”

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Good-bye, First Amendment

A controversial proposal that would give the President the power to seize control of the Internet — essentially cutting off the private-sector in the event of a “cybersecurity emergency” — is still on the table in Washington, CNET reports.The idea, which first surfaced in a bill back in March, is largely in-tact in its revisions, according to a CNET review of the 55-page draft of the bill. (excerpt)

Sam Diaz at ZDNet brings yet another horror story of Obama's Big Brother regime.

Watchdog groups, tech companies and others are already waving red flags, warning that the bill’s vague wording is an issue, that the government isn’t equipped to be trusted with that sort of power and that the bill could have broader implications on the national economy.

Beyond the excerpt posted by CNET, I haven’t read the bill, so I can’t say much about the bill’s language. But the argument that the government is ill-equipped and shouldn’t be trusted with the such far-reaching power is no joke. It wasn’t that long ago — the end of May, actually — that the White House announced a cybersecurity “short-term action plan,” which included the appointment of a cybersecurity czar.

Heading into September, that job remains vacant. What’s more, the White House has since lost its senior cybersecurity aide, who resigned a few weeks ago to go back into the private sector, frustrated by the delays in appointing a national cybersecurity czar.

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Smoking out the Truth

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Have a great weekend. I'll be at the event below!

On August 28, 2009 Taxpayers will go back to the Capitol to Demand our Representatives stop taxing us and start representing us!

In California's vast and fertile central valley, the federal government has shut off the water to farmers. Fields lie fallow, and once thriving orchards are dry and dead. After generations on the land, families are losing their farms. In some areas unemployment exceeds 40%. All this to protect a "minnow." The government is putting fish before families. This insanity must end.

In the mountains, family owned timber operations, working and managing our forests for generations, are being forced into bankruptcy by the state. The government has made their equipment illegal, and regulations are so onerous that it now costs 30% more to bring a standard 2x4 to market in California than it does in Oregon or Washington. Even the large timber companies struggle to survive. In a state rich with timber resources, we import the vast majority of our building materials from other states, because the cost of local production is simply too high due to severe overregulation. The timber industry is literally being driven out of business by the politicians in Sacramento.

Industries from mining to construction, transportation to ranching, and farming to concrete are suffering under impossible burdens placed by unaccountable bureaucrats and arrogant politicians intent on the complete destruction of California's once world class economy.

Yes, something is terribly wrong. Our politicians and their appointed cronies are strangling this great state. Businesses are leaving California in an unprecedented exodus of capital and talent. Productive citizens and their businesses are fleeing to places like Texas and Nevada, which tout more business friendly policies, less regulation and lower taxes. Meanwhile, California's unemployment rate skyrockets, our cost of living increases, and our politicians respond by passing even more stringent legislation and higher taxes...even when we vote against it!

The laws may be different for each industry. The regulations may vary, but they are all symptoms of the same disease. We are all being crushed by burdensome regulations and taxes imposed by politicians who care more for causes and political gamesmanship, than people.

The time for change is now. We simply aren't going to take it anymore.

Bad News - Good News

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10 Confessions of a Fox News Viewer

Okay, I like Fox. I do, even though my favorite show is on at 2 AM CST. But ... here are the top 10 things I would like to ask or know about my favorite network:

10. Those babes at the top and the bottom of the hour ... What are the odds they are knocked on their cans on the Galveston Seawall during a hurricane?

9. Speaking of hurricanes, you know when you have Geraldo Rivera as your lib representatives on your network, you leave yourself open to criticism: "There's a man in the water!!! A man in the water!!! AHHH!! ... Oh, he's working. Back to you."

8. Unlike roller coasters, O'Reilly can only be taken in large quantities if you are on some form of medication or are under 48" tall, that is, small enough to be impressed by some one who successfully located a new big word in the dictionary. "Pusillanimous" ... Don't be a pusillanimous ... (insert smile like Biff from Back to the Future).

7. Now that Brit Hume is gone, I am glad to see Jerry Mathers landed on his feet with a new gig.

6. Speaking of Brett Baier's show, which is my second favorite on Fox, would some one (Kirsten Powers would do) just reach over and slap Krauthammer ... right in the middle of whatever he is saying? Hard. Any time and on any topic. And when he glares at you, do it again. Then, let's listen to him drone on about civility.

5. Hannity can repeat talking points with the tenacity of an auctioneer moving in for the sale. He is a surely good guy to have on our side and along for the ride (as long as there are lots of signs along the way with big print).

4. Speaking of Hannity, those sorority gals he has on to discuss (like, totally ... whatever) you know, like, political thingys and stuff ... yeah, "liberals, like suck Sean.". And they travel in pairs. Throw 'em a football. Tip drill. You know, just once they need to bring out some Minnesota curling chicks to do that segment. That would be good political TV.

3. Pat Caddell's hair. (Copyright notice: New name for a blog. It may already be taken though.)

2. Is it just me, or is Glenn Beck really this guy:



1. Shepard Smith is an odious, vapid man. ("They are murdering people on this bridge in New Orleans, you know, I'm from near here, Bill. There are thousands and thousands dead from Katrina." For which, your humble correspondent Bill O'Reilly deigned him worthy of a Peabody -- actually, a Pulitzer -- right on the spot, of course.) Shep is like, well ... Al Franken plus Red Bull and makeup, minus sense of humor.

That's all. Now, go enjoy our favorite cable channel.

Okay 11 ... Bonus: I swear, and I like Huck. But I tell you when he is up there with that bass, one time he is going to stop and break right into a commercial for some magic oil that he pulls out of his suit coat pocket. I might buy it, mind you. But I'm just sayin' ...

Dead in the Water

Opposing Viewpoint

"I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better had he never lived..."

- Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin -

This isn't intended as a direct refutation of DC's point about how death should neutralize the villainy or herosim of our rulers. They are, after all, just people. The last breath should end any argument about their private lives. Whatever lessons we take away should concern the bigger morals of political power rather than the little morals of the man. But there is something more, for me, to take away from fifty years of Ted Kennedy. He wasn't my deceased contentious neighbor, fussing about the property line the very day the EMT's showed up to carry him away. Edward Kennedy was much more.

Besides the people themselves, the Kennedy myth was so massive and gravitational that it distorted everything that passed by it. So much of it simply wasn't true, beginning with JFK. You and I don't have that advantage, assuming we would even want it. Free societies are corrupted in big and little ways by prolonged adoration of ruling classes of any kind, proletarian or elite. Liberals, for instance, denied themselves in the range of things they were willing to overlook in Edward as long as his orthodoxies remained intact.

In his ways, Edward corroded the truth of many liberal decencies, and he slandered his conservative opponents in ways so vile and ludicrous that you wondered what lay in his heart and in his head. Some wag correctly described Ted as a "distillery of meanness". In this way he amplified all the worst qualities attributed to easy privilege and wealth, and made even his honest, practical, disputes with opponents into matters of the soul. The only ammunition he had on that field came from his infatuated troops on the left, and he dragged them down to his level. Nobody came out better for having fought with, or for, Edward Kennedy. As for his political victories, only time will tell if the price was right.

Wellstone Memorial II?

Regardless of the profound differences with Sen. Kennedy that I have shared my entire adult life, my thoughts are with his family today. In death, we are reminded of that we are all human and our time here is limited. There is never any harm in being gracious in times like these.

We all face our Maker some day. I know some are rejoicing at Sen. Kennedy's death, and my intention here is not to wag a finger of judgment at them. As for me, I am glad that he will not be in the Senate any more. And there is some measure of closure for the Kopeckne family, as well, as Nick notes with his tribute.

Still, moving through the curtain of of the temporal to the eternal should give us all pause. We would do well to remember the humanity of every one, even those with whom we bitterly fought in life.

But for God's grace, we are all capable of, well, you fill in the blank.

For example, we are capable of capitalizing on the death of an icon for political gain, a la the Wellstone Memorial. Remember that disgrace?

For the post-modern Left, whose religion and lifeblood is governmental control, Kennedy's death will likely prompt a resurgence of energy in the healthcare debate and an attempt to flood us with even more emotional appeals "in Kennedy's honor."

They are already talking about it. Call them on this. For in doing so, they fail to respect the dead -- even one they claim to love -- and they devalue human life to the level of a craven political act.

Life is bigger than government. Let's live like it.

PULSE OF THE NATION

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Public told to snoop on lightbulb law breakers

The public have been asked to 'snoop' on shopkeepers who continue to sell traditional light bulbs banned by Europe.

The Telegraph reports there is evidence of people hoarding the old fashioned bulbs around Europe and enforcement agencies are ready to crack down.

"Under this Government we begin to resemble East Germany in the 1980s where we snoop and report on local businesses," he said. "No doubt the next move will be to snoop on your parents if they continue to use old fashioned light bulbs."

From September 1, it will be illegal to import conventional pearl or frosted bulbs of any shape or wattage. Traditional incandescent bulbs of 100 watts will also be banned under European law aimed at reducing energy bills and carbon dioxide emissions.

They will be replaced by energy saving lights, which usually use flourescent tubes, but it is thought some consumers will still prefer their 'traditional' bulbs, particularly for reading lamps.

There is evidence of people hoarding the old fashioned bulbs around Europe and enforcement agencies are ready to crack down on unscrupulous businessmen who continue to import the "illegal bulbs" from factories in China.

In Britain, trading standards officers will be carrying out inspections and are asking members of the public to report any shop continuing to stock the illegal bulbs.

Any individual found importing the bulbs into the EU will face a £5,000 fine and it could be an unlimited amount for big companies.

The Department for the Environment insisted it was necessary to use the law to ensure people buy energy efficient bulbs that will save them around £37 per annum on energy bills and save the UK one million tonnes of carbon every year.

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'The fault, dear Barack, is not in our stars, But in ourselves'

Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner wonders whether the Blue-Chip Obama brand has been tarnished.

"Take away the rhetoric and charisma, and this same absence of preparation, professional research, and focused public defense seems to apply to almost everything Obama has offered, from more stimulus and more deficit spending to cash for clunkers and cap and trade."

Liberal columnists decrying the Obama administration’s supposed lack of partisan fortitude and eagerness for a nasty fight for health care seem oddly detached from reality. The opposition to Obamacare would have gone nowhere had the president offered a concise plan, had his team kept repeating four or five logical and easily understandable talking points, and had he prepared a few pat answers to the more controversial elements of the plan, from the public option to so-called “end of life” panels to treatment of illegal aliens and the real cost.

Instead, Obama and his advisers, in lazy fashion, outsourced the plan to the partisan left-wingers of the Democratic party who are key House chairs. They in turn offered up a 1,000-page legalese mess, which the administration’s key players never read, and which Obama arrogantly thought he could wing through in a few weeks with his “hope and change” / “trust me” cadences.

Once a few citizens at town halls started to call them on it, it quickly became clear not just that Obama’s health-care reform was an effort to emulate in the long run the failed Canadian system, but far more importantly, that none of its defenders were able to explain, much less defend, the plan.

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Two Gigantic Personalities

For weeks now, Nickie has been pestering me to jump aboard this blog raft with him and DC. I'm reluctant to do it but he's plied me with flattery, Valomilk cups and low-cost prescriptions. So far, it's working. He wants to have me nearby. I'm a father-figure to him - compensating for all the wives, lawyers, clerics and parole officers who have let him down over the years. But most of all, he wants me to keep an eye on DC, who can suddenly go Cain on Goomba's Abel, completely without warning.

DC's spontaneous malicious battery on Nickie began years ago when they both worked for The Reader's Digest. Nickie was ghost-writing "Quotable Quotes" for famous dead people who couldn't sue, and DC was fabricating anecdotes for "Humor In Uniform". For a Christmas issue, Nickie conjured a nitwit exclamation for George Armstrong Custer.

"We're winning, lads! When I squint, there aren't as many of 'em!

Nickie didn't know that DC was a Custerphile (see DC's avatar), but it accounts for DC's violence and the debris field that followed, even down to today. Nickie still defends the authenticity of the Custer quote, insisting that it was reported in 1892 by a Harvard-educated Lakota warrior named Swings-Three-Ways, who was at the Little Big Horn as a young man. Nobody believes Nickie. I don't. And certainly not DC, who is an expert on Custer's Last Stand, an occasional blogger, and the top Gatling Gun detailer in Texas.

Anyway, when I'm not destroying the actionable, smutty illustrated notes they exchange, and their letters-cut from-magazines hate mail to each other, I might also lay some intellectual terrazzo on their intellectual cement.

As for me, the less you know the better. I'm nearing retirement age or Box City, depending on the public option or which doctor I believe. I was born into a feuding New England family, but spent many years in the old, de facto segregated South. It was the South of live oaks, swaying Spanish Moss, pecan treats and manners. I can never think of it as a sinkhole of racism, snobbery and ignorance, as many do.

The New England side of me was poisoned by the reformist virus, and I ended up with chronic liberalism, which flared up until the late 1960's. A dose of war and a journey to the ends of my personal galaxy finally cured me. Melancholy is the destroyer of fantasy. Every conservative knows it. Read David Mamet's Village Voice piece "Why I'm no longer a brain-dead liberal". You'll see yourself in it.

I"m also a conservative today because I usually side with the mutineers. If you aren't mocking and piercing the pretensions and charade of all authority, you're shirking the first obligation of a free-born. That doesn't mean you bend the proper rules; you just don't allow the improper rules to bend you or anyone else. Old liberalism used to advance the same creed, but new liberalism is a suffocating army of curtain-twitchers, making sure that life outside isn't happening without some dialectic approved by the authorities. And lots of new liberals are the authorities.

My first principles come from four lines by Blake - not Robert Blake, Goomba, but William Blake, mystic, hallucinatory artist and poet:

This life's five windows of the soul

Distort the heavens from pole to pole

And teach us to believe a lie

When we see with, not through, the eye

For now, though, I'll just be straddling the fault line between two gigantic personalities.

All Old People will Die this Winter

BREAKING NEWS

Swine flu will kill the entire U.S. population of senior citizens this year, hospitalize 2.9 billion patients worldwide and lead to as many as 89,000,000 deaths in nations without universal health care, a worse disaster than the infamous Black Plague, White House advisers said.

In a report by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, President Barack Obama today was urged to speed passage of his health care reform and name a senior member of the White House staff to the position of Pandemic Czar. Legislation must be passed by mid-September to allow for the vaccination of as many as 40 gazillion people, the advisory group said.

Seasonal flu usually kills about 36,000 Americans, said Ezekial Emanuel, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Swine flu, also called H1N1, causes more rampant casualties among old people than seasonal flu, while leaving people 65 and older doomed to slow and painful deaths, said Mike Hunt of the CDC.

“This isn’t the flu that we’re used to,” said Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “The 2009 H1N1 virus will kill just about everyone this fall. We won’t know until we’re in the middle of the flu season whether any of our Baby Boomers will survive, but because it’s a new strain, it’s likely to kill oodles of oldsters.”

“We are making every preparation effort assuming that Public Option health care will be available in mid-October,” Sebelius said today at the CDC’s Atlanta offices.

According to what the advisory report describes as a “plausible scenario,” 99 percent to 100 percent of the country’s senior population will be infected in the fall and winter.

Boycotting the Boycotters

Andrew Breitbart details the intolerance of the Left.

Yet amid the cries of "dissent is patriotic" - a phrase seen on the bumper stickers of cars in the Whole Foods parking lot - the antiwar movement grew and grew, unfettered by the war's supporters or by the party in power.

As the Hollywood Left churned out antiwar film screeds, it was creating a narrative of its victimhood as it victimized Mr. Bush and his administration with the false accusation that dissenters were being persecuted. But now that they are in power, Democrats are brazenly wielding punitive weaponry against dissenting Americans and are using the power of the state to shut up citizens.

John Mackey - the founder, CEO and marketing genius behind Whole Foods - finds himself in an organic, unsustainable mess with his carefully cultivated affluent, liberal customer base after penning an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare."

For starters, Mr. Mackey opens with a line from known-liberal-allergen Margaret Thatcher that features the dreaded "S" word: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Then he goes on to provide eight sensible free-market solutions gleaned from his company's well-regarded employee health care program.

Mr. Mackey, a free-market libertarian, is now at the mercy of an unforgiving grass-roots mob intent on destroying his company. More than 25,000 people have signed on to a Whole Foods boycott on Facebook.

"Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives," the online petition reads. "Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods' anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities."

A complementary Web site, WholeBoycott.com, features unintentionally comical video testimonials from aggrieved former customers. The mainstream media have picked up on the story and fanned the flames.

The success of Whole Foods is largely built on Mr. Mackey's understanding of the liberal mind. It wants the good life - but with instant absolution for the sin of conspicuous consumption. Whole Foods is marketing at its best. Iconography and slogans throughout the store - not unlike those Barack Obama used to win the presidency - tell the shopper they are saving the planet in large and small ways.

The product is so good even conservatives and skeptics are willing to play along.

But Mr. Mackey missed the key ingredient of modern liberalism: intolerance to the ideas of nonliberals. And this miscalculation may prove to be devastating to his multibillion-dollar business.

Everywhere one looks these days, the intolerance of self-avowed liberals is on display. Especially since Mr. Obama came to power.

The purportedly open-minded and empathic among us who now run everything - save for NASCAR and Nashville - openly wage war against those who dare disagree.

Witness Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi's joint-penned editorial in USA Today in which the House's two top Democrats describe those publicly questioning Mr. Obama's proposed health care system overhaul as "un-American."

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We must believe Obama

...and where's the free health care?

Fake Fliers Promise 'Free Food And Beer' At Mayoral Candidate Event

ATLANTA -- Atlanta mayoral candidate Lisa Borders said someone created fake fliers promising free food and beer at a scheduled block party she held Saturday. Borders said the fliers were distributed to people at a homeless center in downtown Atlanta.

"We are deeply saddened that another campaign would use the most vulnerable members of our community in an attempt to disrupt our event,” said Stacey Abrams, campaign manager.

Abrams said the “old-fashioned” style block party was meant to thank volunteers, current supporters and encourage others to join Borders in her quest to become Atlanta's next mayor.

The event, however, did feature cotton candy, popcorn, shaved ice, hot dogs, hamburgers and entertainment.

“By misusing our logo and handing out these fliers, they misled men and women who have faced more than enough difficulty,” said Abrams.

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Opposing Views

Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star Tribune says:

Citizens are speaking truth to power. Aren't Democrats supposed to like that?

Protesters and citizens asking angry questions have flooded the "town halls" where congressional representatives have tried to sell President Obama's health care reform agenda to the American people.

The protesters have stolen the show, with 69 percent of Americans telling pollsters they are following the story closely. Town-hall-goers -- some raucous -- are probing costs, are raising questions about government encroachment on private life, and are deploring the fact that few legislators seem to have read the 1,000-page health care reform bill. Democrats have often had trouble answering credibly.

The protesters are having an impact. Last week, the administration appeared to pull back on the "public option" as a centerpiece of Obama's reform agenda.

I thought folks on the left loved protesters -- the rowdier, the better. Liberals are fond of reminding us that free speech is sacred, and that dissent -- "speaking truth to power" -- is a patriotic duty. Remember the 2008 Republican National Convention? The ACLU of Minnesota went to court to win a parade permit that would have allowed thousands of protesters, including anarchists who had vowed to shut down the convention, to encircle St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center, where delegates convened.
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Frank Rich of the New York Times says:

The G.O.P., whose ranks have now dwindled largely to whites in Dixie and the less-populated West, is not even a paper tiger — it’s a paper muskrat.

“It is time to water the tree of liberty” said the sign carried by a gun-toting protester milling outside President Obama’s town-hall meeting in New Hampshire two weeks ago. The Thomas Jefferson quote that inspired this message, of course, said nothing about water: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That’s the beauty of a gun — you don’t have to spell out the “blood.”

The protester was a nut. America has never had a shortage of them. But what’s Tom Coburn’s excuse? Coburn is a Republican senator from Oklahoma, where 168 people were murdered by right-wing psychopaths who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Their leader, Timothy McVeigh, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt when he committed this act of mass murder. Yet last Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.
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Yeah, I'm also posting this

Since this work of art is out on the WWW, I want to be able to say "I helped to circulate it".

I hope you will too.

On his YouTube page, the Marine in the video says this:

"I, David William Hedrick, a member of the silent majority, decided that I was not going to be silent anymore. So, I let U.S. Congressman Brian Baird have it. I was one questioner out of 38, that was called at random from an audience that started at 3,000 earlier in the evening. Not expecting to be called on, I quickly scratched what I wanted to say on a borrowed piece of paper and with a pen that I borrowed from someone else in the audience minutes before I spoke. So much for the planned talking points of the right wing conspiracy."

Hat Tip to Soloman