The Columbia Conservative

President Obama's Line Item Veto of the Creator

2010-09-29T14:16:00.002-04:00

Our President has chosen a new path for our nation, one that should trouble each and every citizen, especially every citizen of faith.

On two separate occasions, President Obama, speaking about the inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, has chosen to omit the Creator from the discussion.

In so doing, the President seems to be trying to apply a line item veto on the Declaration of Independence to strike God from the public square.

How far this is from our Founding Fathers, from Jefferson’s statement that “the God who gave us life gave us liberty” to Franklin’s assessment that “God governs in the affairs of men” to Supreme Court Justice John Jay’s contention that as a Christian nation, America should choose Christian rulers. What would the Black Robe Regiment of the Revolution think of such a statement?

How far this is even from 20th century Democrat Presidents such as FDR, who proclaimed America’s entry into World War Two as a “defense of Christian civilization,” praying to Almighty God for his protection on D-Day, to allow the troops to “preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization,” and calling the nation to “a continuance of prayer.”

If there are any who doubt that our President is a Marxist, let them doubt no more. If any doubt his dedication to godlessness, take a look at his face as he reads the teleprompter (loaded with the correct text of the Declaration) and chooses to omit the Creator.

If there are any who doubt the need for spiritual awakening in our nation, look no further than this. Then heed President Roosevelt’s call to prayer for the nation. I hope you will join me in praying for spiritual awakening in our state and our nation before it is too late.

9 years later: The Ballad of Johnny Heff

2010-09-10T13:58:00.006-04:00

As we remember 9/11/2001 this weekend, I am reprising my Project 2,996 posting from 9/11/2006, memorializing one of the heroes who fell that awful day, nine years ago. Somehow, in the kerfuffle over burning the Koran or building the unthinkable "Ground Zero victory mosque," this seems more appropriate than ever.

May we never forget.

*****

Johnny Heffernan was a guitar player, and reportedly a very good one. He played first for a band called the Psychotics, then for a New York neo-punk band known as the Bullys, wearing his trademark black t-shirt and jeans, and working with Marky Ramone on their first album: Stomposition. According to John Holmstrom, editor of Punk Magazine, The Bullys were a force in renewing the punk scene in New York, and Johnny was the true force behind the band.

If not for The Bullys, I might never have bothered with the relaunch of PUNK magazine. This band, more than anything else, convinced me that there's a real rock 'n' roll scene out there worth writing about. I wanted to bring out a new PUNK magazine so maybe we could put The Bullys on the map, just like we did for The Ramones, Blondie and the Dead Boys back in the day… Johnny had real star quality. He was good-looking, articulate (in his own way), talented, ambitious, and charismatic… I thought he was like the Jimmy Cagney of punk rock.

Johnny Heff was as rebellious as you would expect from a punk rocker, except that the occasional target of his anger was radical Islam. And sometimes, that came out in lyrical form:

"I hear the government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. Where da f*** is Gasghanistan? I gotta get a f***in' map for dat one. Anyway, it must be one tough m*****f***ing country to wage war against chicks, huh? Since some dude named The Taliban took power in 1996, women had to wear some s*** called the Bercha or somethin', and have been beaten and stoned in public for not wearin' the proper attire. So I guess tattoos and leather pants are out of the question, eh? ... Well, if they ever get into a war with the United States, they should know we ain't gonna just send a bunch of chicks to f*** 'em up... I'll go to fight... Anybody know where 'dis backward frickin' place is?"

So, in his own very unique way, Johnny Heff was alert to who the enemy was, years before the rest of us had necessarily figured it out.

Johnny was also a committed family man. A rebel on stage, Johnny was notoriously mellow around his wife Lori and daughter Samantha, teaching “Sammy” to swim, taking her to her first concert, even helping her do her nails. Lori described Johnny as her “soul mate” and Johnny’s friends were amazed at the way Johnny “marshmellowed out” around his wife and daughter.

Unfortunately, being the lead guitarist in a punk band rarely pays the bills, although the band was becoming very successful and hoped to start touring, so in 1993 Johnny also took a day job, one that allowed him to support his family.

Johnny became a New York City Firefighter.

Perhaps that didn’t seem that heroic at the time, but it certainly does now. You see, on a bright sunny day, five years ago this morning, Johnny Heffernan of Engine Company 28, Ladder 11 raced into a burning World Trade Center, one of the first on the scene.

Maybe Johnny had the lyrics to his song going through his head that morning, as he raced up the stairs to rescue as many people as possible. Maybe he realized exactly who was responsible for the destruction he was witnessing, and maybe he didn’t. We will never know. Nor will we know exactly how many lives he saved that day, just another FDNY firefighter “doing his job” with unparalleled heroism. What we know is that he was right, and he fought bravely to save lives that day just as he’d lyrically promised he would if given the chance.

And that they found him at Ground Zero on October 2, 2001, on his beloved Lori’s 31st birthday.

As we remember the events of that awful day, we also pause to remember and honor the lives of those who were lost that day. I never knew Johnny Heff, and I wish I could’ve met him. He sounds like a brash barrel of fun to me.

I don’t know if any members of the Heffernan family will read this. I hope that if they do, that I will have done Johnny justice (even though I know I’m probably not capable of that). I also hope if you are reading this, that you’ll be willing to add a few notes of your own to honor the fallen hero that you knew far better than any of the rest of us.

One final note. It seems that heroism runs in the Heffernan family. Johnny’s younger brother Michael is a FDNY firefighter, and youngest brother Brian is NYPD.

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Til all success be nobleness And every gain divine!

*****

I want to thank Dale and the folks at Project 2,996 for the opportunity to participate. It has been an honor, a humbling experience, and an emotional one.

Please take the time today to read more of the tributes to the men and women of 9/11.

*****

To support the family of Johnny Heffernan, and others of his engine company who perished that fateful day, make your check out to:

Eng28/Lad11, WTC Relief Fund

And mail it to:

Engine Co. 28/Ladder Co. 11
222 East 2nd Street
NYC NY 10003

Sources: LGF, Legacy.com, September11victims.com, thebullys.com, Punk Magazine.

Early Odds for 2012

2010-08-30T14:39:00.003-04:00

As we’ve done in cycles past, here are the odds for the Republican nomination on the likely challengers for the Presidential ticket with 17 months to the January 2012 SC Primary. These do not reflect my desire for any particular candidate, I'm genuinely undecided on that at the moment.

TIER I: The Early Favorites (5-3 odds; 60%)

Republicans have a long history of picking last times second hat as this times winner (see Bush Sr., Dole, McCain). There are a few folks who could answer to that description this time around.

(5-1): Sarah Palin (former Gov-AK) has been building national networks and national ID (positives and negatives) and a group of primary winners since her stint as McCains VP nominee. She has as strong a pull with the NASCAR voter as anyone in the field. NAGGING QUESTION: Will voters forgive her resignation after a half term as Governor of Alaska, and can Levi Johnston please go away?

(5-1): Mitt Romney (former Gov-MA) looks the strongest of the holdovers from 2008, with a strong economic message coupled with Wall Street experience and deep pockets. The rise of Glenn Beck may help, in that it may tamp down the anti-Mormon thing. Then again, if you couldn’t beat John McCain, we may question why we should elect you now. NAGGING QUESTION: Is the author of RomneyCare the right standard bearer for a party running on the repeal of ObamaCare?

(5-1): Newt Gingrich (former Speaker-GA) has been sounding themes that could capitalize on Tea Party type momentum within the Republican rank and file. He is clearly the most intelligent (from an IQ standpoint) candidate in the field, and will be fearsome in debates. NAGGING QUESTION: What’s the expiration date on personal baggage, and will party voters look past those indiscretions as well as the failures of 1996?

TIER II: The Governors (3-1, 33%)

Presidents usually come from the Executive Branch, not the legislative. With an inexperienced Legislator-President in office, a governor burnishing solid credentials as a successful executive can make the case for challenge more readily.

(10-1): Tim Pawlenty (Gov-MN) has already started web ads on key conservative websites around the country to get the word out. NAGGING QUESTION: Does he have the charisma to get noticed in a large field and handle himself in debates with a master communicator like Barack Obama?

(10-1): Mitch Daniels (Gov-IN) is similar to Pawlenty – maybe too similar. A Governor with a solid background, low name ID, and charisma that no one would confuse with Reagan, barring a side to his personality that we simply haven’t seen yet. Still, if he can make a strong case with the experience he has, from a Midwestern state, he’s got as good a chance to catch lightning in a bottle as anyone. NAGGING QUESTION: Did his comments (which he has since backed down from in great haste) that the party needed to leave divisive social issues behind doom this Presbyterian’s chances with social conservatives?

(10-1): Haley Barbour (Gov-MS) might best be described as The One Guy in Government During Hurricane Katrina Who Knew What He Was Doing. He’s a consummate party insider as former RNC Chair, who might still be able to reach out as an outsider Southern Governor with a history of competence in office. NAGGING QUESTION: Will Northeastern (NH), Midwestern (IA), and Western (NV) states vote for a Governor from Mississippi?

(100-1): Mike Huckabee (former Gov-AR) still has major pull within the evangelical community. Unfortunately, his TV show has done little to ease the concerns of fiscal conservatives who seem to be so motivated right now. The success of the TV show, combined with what appears to be a reversal of his earlier weight loss probably precludes the run, which is why I list him here. NAGGING QUESTION: How does he distance himself from the video where he begs the Arkansas legislature for tax increases in a year where fiscal issues are king?

(100-1): Chris Christie (Gov-NJ) is having one heck of a great first year in office to be on this list already. He’s taken on union power in New Jersey, and won. That’s incredible. But it’s important for his supporters to remember that he’s only been in office for 8 months. Let’s give him time to ripen in office. NAGGING QUESTION: Is one year in executive office enough for Republican Presidential Primary voters?

(100-1) Bobby Jindal (Gov-LA) is the youngest person listed here. He’s got an extremely bright future on the national stage, has a brilliant mind and a captivating personality to match. But he’s probably too young, could use that one more term of executive experience and has the added inconvenience of having to run for reelection as Governor just 10 weeks before Iowa. As such, I think he waits four or eight more years. NAGGING QUESTION: Is the Republican Party ready to nominate a non-white for President? (Editor’s note: yes.)

TIER III: The Legislators (14-1, 7%)

The main problem for this group is that Republican Senators who run for President don’t often win, even if they get the nomination (think Dole, McCain). It’s worse for Congressmen: we haven’t elected a member of the lower House to the White House since the 1880s. That’s unlikely to change.

(33-1): Jim DeMint (Sen-SC) has been building national name ID as the leader of the Senate Conservatives. He’s clearly as ready as he’ll ever be, turning 60 just before the ’10 season begins. He’s been coy answering this question because the Tea Party movement absolutely adores him, and he’d be a natural for them. Still, his long term plans may have more to do with being the leader of the new Republican Majority rather than running for the White House in a ten candidate field. My gut is that he works that angle as well as the “king maker” angle, seeking to unify SC conservatives behind a single conservative candidate. NAGGING QUESTION: Would you rather be the leader of the Senate or a Senator running for President?

(100-1) Rick Santorum (former Sen-PA) has a lot going for him. He’s a strong conservative across the board. He’s a great communicator. He’s got “that look” and presents very well on TV. NAGGING QUESTION: Is that enough to overcome the loss of the Senate seat in 2006?

(100-1) John Thune (Sen-SD) is nationally known as “The guy who knocked off Tom Daschle,” for which we’ll all be forever grateful. Earlier this year, this was the hot pick; six months later, the energy seems to have faded. NAGGING QUESTION: Will the TARP vote haunt him as much as it did other members?

(100-1) Mike Pence (House-IN) has become known as the leader of the House conservatives for the better part of a decade. He’s a phenomenal public speaker who has made the first rounds already to solid reviews. He’s very personable on camera and in person. NAGGING QUESTION: In addition to the historic House problem, can he raise the money (probably $25M) to compete early and stay in to Super Tuesday?

(100-1) Ron Paul (House-TX) has built one of the most effective grassroots networks in the country, culminating in the “Campaign for Liberty” that has his fingerprints at the moment. In the process, he has also alienated millions of likely Republican voters with foreign policy stances and proclamations well outside the mainstream (see 9/11 quotes). In the final analysis, though, no matter how talented or well organized, time takes its toll, and Dr. Paul will be a venerable 75 when the campaign kicks off. No President has even been elected a first term older than 70. NAGGING QUESTION: If Dr. Paul decides on a third party run instead, does he doom the country to four more years of Obama?

TIER IV The Pretenders (OFF, 0%)

I keep hearing General David Petraeus mentioned as Presidential material. Yeah, he does look good in a uniform, and his recent comments about listening to Enya may qualify as soccer mom outreach, but I still don’t see him taking on the Presidency for a first foray into politics. Eisenhower was a special case as a 5-star commander of the European theater; Petraeus is not so universally loved as Ike was.

I also have heard whispered that we’ll see the return of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Puhleeease. The guy who made New York a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants and sued the federal government to stop the line item veto has ZERO chance in this electoral climate. Personally, I think he knows that, and he’s going to stick to issues like the 9/11 families and opposing the Ground Zero mosque.

Finally, the saddest case – our own Governor Mark Sanford. 16 months ago, I was at his Coosaw Encampment with 300 other conservative state leaders. One person (who I will allow to remain unnamed) was wearing a “Sanford 2012” hat. He coulda been a contender, maybe even the favorite, with the happy marriage, the four boys, and the proven record as a fiscal conservative Governor. Within a month came “Soul-gate” and all that exploded. Yet, I’ve heard in recent days that he may try to revive his political career and run for office again. I list him here because of some connections that I know the Governor has with national level conservative donors, but I don’t personally believe this is where he will end up running. More time needs to elapse before he tries that comeback.

The Alien President and the Ground Zero Mosque

2010-08-14T07:43:00.004-04:00

The radical Muslims are doing their dead level best to make trouble again. This time it’s the so-called “Cordoba Initiative” – a mosque on the edge of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan named for the center of the European caliphate in the 8th Century. Cordoba was a cathedral converted into a mosque, meant as the symbol of Muslim conquest in Christian Europe. The modern “Cordoba Initiative” laughably passes itself off as an “interfaith exchange;” the original Cordoba’s “interfaith exchange” was the tax that Muslims collected from the local Christian population. It seems, then, that the mosque idea is purely an exhibition of Muslim strength against the weakness of the West to stand up to Sharia extremism.

Muslims know this. Writing in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, two moderate Muslims called the mosque a “deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel.” They were arguing against the idea of the Ground Zero/Cordoba mosque as an act of “bad faith.”

Into this maelstrom steps what Robert Weissberg of the American Thinker has termed the “alien rule” of Barack Obama. Normally, a President could be counted on to stand up for American concepts, things like the hallowed ground of Ground Zero. But, it seems, this President is incapable of considering the concepts of “sacred” or “hallowed” ground, and yesterday, against all logic, the President came out in strong support of the Cordoba Ground Zero mosque.

In the Muslim world, this will be seen as an invitation to attack our weakness, a symbol of Muslim conquest over the weak Americans, building a mosque on the site of Islamist triumph in the United States. Building this mosque would be a greater victory for the jihadists than the destruction of the World Trade Center, in that it allows the victory to be celebrated and built upon.

This morning’s Canada Free Press terms Barack Obama as “the First Un-American President.” After last night, I fail to see how any other term fits.

What should Immigration “Reform” look like?

2010-08-11T10:03:00.004-04:00

In a recent post, I talked about what South Carolina could do (as a state and individual communities) to fight illegal immigration from non-federal levels (in the absence of any solid federal leadership on the issue through the last six administrations…)

But that begs the question: If there is to be immigration reform, which virtually everyone agrees needs to happen in some form or fashion, what should those “reforms” look like? I’ve tackled this issue in a post for SCHotline about 4 years ago, but that blog is gone now, so let’s revisit with four more years to ponder it.

PRE-REFORM STEPS:

• ENFORCE THE BORDER

I’m not saying put tanks and fighter planes on the border, or issue shoot on sight orders. I am saying build a double fence the length of the southern border with enforceable points of entry. Then staff it properly. Border enforcement is a valid use of taxpayer dollars, but one that has been badly neglected by every administration since Carter. I’d much rather spend resources protecting the country from an invasion than on stimulus packages for bureaucrats and special interests. This is an act of will that simply requires a government willing to enforce the law and a Congress willing to pay for it. This should be a no brainer, but it never gets done.

• REFORM THE BUREAUCRACY

We need to take a hard look at the bureaucracies that have failed to date. I’ve heard horror stories from plenty of legitimate immigrant applications that take far too long to get approved. We need to make it harder to get here illegally, yes, but we also need to make it easier to get here legally or understand why an application has been denied. This is the carrot in the carrot and stick approach. Mandate that applications have to be dealt with in a certain amount of time, and then lets have Congressional oversight to ensure that those metrics are met.

• ENFORCE CURRENT LAW MORE EFFECTIVELY

Why have deportations gone down since Eisenhower was President? Has every President since simply not cared enough about the issue? No one is saying you can deport 20 million illegal immigrants all at once. Start by enforcing the law. The current Arizona situation proves yet again that when the laws are enforced a large number of people will self-deport. That’s a good starting point for this process.

REFORM COMPONENTS

• END AUTOMATIC BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

I know this will come as a surprise to some (since I’ve been a pretty vociferous critic of our Senior Senator over the years) but Senator Graham is absolutely right on the need to tweak the definition of the automatic birthright citizenship of the 14th Amendment. You can do very little to fix to current mess without handling the Anchor Baby/Birth Tourism issue. Bob McAlister has done a great piece on this issue; The Heritage Foundation says it can be done with clarifying legislation (as opposed to another Constitutional Amendment) – and George Will agrees. What needs to be clarified is that only the children of citizens or permanent legal residents gain automatic citizenship; anyone else needs to go through the naturalization process – complete with application.

• GUEST WORKER PROGRAM

Short an overhaul of welfare reform that would stop subsidizing laziness in the general populace, we’re going to still need someone to do the jobs that are currently being done by illegals (in South Carolina, this is predominantly peach picking, chicken plucking, and construction). What we need is to be able to have these be done by people who are here legally, who will pay their fair share of taxes while they’re here, and who will go back home when they’re done. Such a program would involve employers being able to bring in workers to do specific jobs for specific time periods before returning to their home countries. Reforming the bureaucracy is a must before you do this because otherwise, no one will get to work on time. Ending automatic birthright citizenship is a must before you do this, as you want the guest workers to bring their families for maximum societal stability and economic gain without creating permanent anchors.

• NO AMNESTY – NO NEW PATH TO CITIZENSHIP FOR THOSE HERE ILLEGALLY NOW

There are plenty of paths to citizenship now. We don’t need to create more, and more importantly, we don’t need to reward those who have come here illegally by letting them stay. If they want to work here, they’ll need to apply under the guest worker program. If they want to immigrate here, they’ll have to go back to their home country and apply from there like everyone else, going through the background checks and fulfilling the application process along the way.

As an aside, let’s define amnesty. Amnesty is defined as allowing the criminal to keep what they’ve stolen. In this case, the illegal alien has stolen a place in the country. “Amnesty” is anything that lets them keep it – even with “fines, back taxes” or whatever other artifices are attached to the process. Put me down for no amnesty; it’s a perversion of the rule of law, and it should be unacceptable to a modern society based on law.

• INDEFINITE MORATORIUM ON IMMIGRATION FROM MUSLIM COUNTRIES

Let’s face it, the current system invites more attacks. Until we can be certain that the jihadist threat is behind us (and it certainly isn’t yet), it behooves us to protect ourselves. This means no more student visas (like the ones used by 9/11 attackers) or permanent resident visas for those who are coming from high risk countries, unless they can certify a status worthy of asylum. This isn’t racial profiling – it’s religious profiling; it’s important to remember that our rights as a nation to survive outweigh the religious rights of non-citizens who seek our demise but want to live here in the meantime. The Constitution, after all, wasn’t a suicide pact.

OTHER POTENTIAL FACTORS TO CONSIDER:

Other things that I suppose could be included in an acceptable form of a “comprehensive immigration reform” might include changing the current system to more of a points based system (more points for a college degree or needed work skill, for instance). We also need to emphasize English only in our immigration system – if you want to live here, you agree to become part of our culture and that means communicating in our shared language. English proficiency (using forms printed only in English, giving tests using only English) should be mandatory for immigrating to the US and for citizenship.

Agree? Disagree? Want to discuss? Comments are open below…

On Censure Resolutions

2010-08-03T08:50:00.004-04:00

I know a thing or two about censure resolutions. For those of you who missed it in June, I was the author of the resolution by the Lexington County GOP censuring Senator Jake Knotts for the “@*#&$%! raghead” remark (though, in truth, I’m just as angry about the “@*#&$%! pro-lifers” remark Knotts made at another Senator just off the Senate floor earlier this year…).

Last night, the Greenville GOP voted 61-2 to censure Senator Lindsey Graham over a litany of ills concluding with being not enough of a Republican. You’ve heard them before, and if you’re like me, you agree that Senator Graham was wrong on most, if not all counts: Judges Haynes (no), Sotomayor and Kagan (yes), amnesty for illegals, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, supporting TARP, cap and trade, comments about Glenn Beck, comments about earmarks, etc.

The question is do these resolutions work, and do they matter?

Clearly I think there’s a place for them, or I wouldn’t have written the Knotts censure. Were I a member of the Greenville GOP, I would likely have voted yes last night.

But it strikes me that these resolutions eventually become whistling into a tornado.

Senator Knotts reaction was one of complete contempt. If the resolution was intended to force him out of office (it wasn’t), it failed miserably. If anything, Senator Knotts is more dug in than ever. Likewise, the reaction out of the Graham camp will likely mirror his performance at the Greenville GOP convention last spring – I won, I’m your Senator for four more years, get over it.

All that said, local County Parties have a right to express their displeasure with their elected officials, especially when those officials depart from the values they expressed when getting themselves elected. Senator Graham spoke to the Lexington GOP Convention in 2007 and talked about making sure President Bush got his pro-life judges. By the end of that summer he had put the knife to the Haynes nomination over the Guantanamo issue. For those of us who are conservatives who care about judges, that knife was lodged in our backs, too. Good on Greenville for holding his feet to the fire.

There’s one more thing that makes Greenville’s censure interesting, different, and bold. The Greenville GOP added one last clause that puts some teeth into the resolution that others may wind up copying. They barred the Senator from addressing Greenville County GOP meetings in the future. That’s about as strong as a County Party can affect within the boundaries of the law. We can’t throw people out of the Party (the law defining Party membership is too vague), but we can bar folks from meetings.

What the censures will eventually turn into (it seems to me) is fodder for primary campaigns against Knotts and Graham, assuming both men decide to run for reelection as Republicans. Graham has two more years to develop his response (and for the hoopla to die down) than Knotts does, but that’s also two more years for opposition to develop a gameplan. Either way, both men can probably expect mailpieces/TV ads blaring “Rebuked by the GOP” or something similar.

Whether those efforts succeed may rise and fall on whether or not we can finally change to a voter registration by party/closed primary system that protects the First Amendment Freedom of Association rights of party members. In a closed primary, Knotts or Graham would almost surely fail. In a system that allows Democratics to vote in Republican primaries, Knotts and Graham at least have a chance to survive politically. Time will tell.

Heresy for Sale: The Downfall of Rep. Mark Siljander

2010-07-26T10:13:00.008-04:00

There once was a Member of the House of Representatives. His name was Mark Siljander. He was known as a conservative from Michigan, and he served three terms, from 1981-1987. Pretty unremarkable.

Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While most of us studied up on shari’a law and woke up to the dangers of the Islamist thousand year war on Western Civilization, Siljander tried to “bridge the Muslim-Christian divide.” He took trips to the Middle East, bringing Christian leaders with him to try to “bridge the divide”. He wrote a book which claimed (to much acclaim) that the Islamic Allah and the Christian God were one and the same. The former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon wrote the foreword, and notable post-modern Christian heretic Brian McLaren joined in the praise and adoration of the book. So did Dr. Ergun Caner, who was dismissed earlier this month as the head of Liberty University’s seminary after an investigation into his own fraudulent past and claims. The book managed to put itself on the shelves of Christian bookstores around the country and right here in South Carolina.

Of course, in addition to being a brainless heresy, the whole thing was a fraud.

Siljander was indicted in federal court for money laundering, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice on behalf of the Islamic American Relief Agency, a group raided in 2004 by the FBI and referred to as “Al Qaeda in Missouri”. Their Executive Director was trying to teach shari’a in American public schools. As it turns out, Siljander had been paid $75000 under the table to represent IARA and try to improve their status with the Senate Finance Committee (who had listed them as a terrorist supporting organization.) According to the original indictment, Siljander allegedly laundered money for an Afghan warlord with ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Earlier this month, Siljander entered a plea deal to obstruction of justice and illegally representing IARA without filing as a lobbyist. He faces fifteen years in the federal pokey.

The website for the book is still up, and Edwin Meese, Rod Beckstrom, and Cal Thomas still have their names up there (Memo to their PR reps: you might want to get that pulled down…). The book stands as thoroughly discredited as its author, a paid shill for a terrorist faith who got his hand caught in the cookie jar.

Those who went with him to Sudan and other places around the world to promote ‘interfaith understanding’ should beware: they’ve been duped – big time. The doctrines he espoused were in direct conflict with Biblical teaching on the identity of Christ and His supremacy. Worse, they appear to have been bought and paid for by enemies of the faith and of the nation.

Next steps? Christian bookstores need to take this one off the shelves, including on college campuses. His can no longer be considered a respectable opinion with which orthodox evangelicals disagree; it’s paid hackery at its worst.

Congressmen everywhere – especially the newest class of former Congressman – should take note at the dangers of going for the quick lobbying buck after leaving office. It’s a road fraught with dangers that too often end in prison terms.

Finally, the rest of us need to keep our guard up. Creeping Shari’a has many sources, many friends in high places. Citizens continue to stay on guard for their liberty, and so we must. Our liberties need to remain protected against those who would sell us out to the Islamists for 30 pieces of silver.

Freedom of Worship, Sex Education, and the Loss of Parental Rights

2010-07-19T11:58:00.006-04:00

This may not seem political, but it is.

There has been a left-wing consortium trying to rewrite traditional Constitutional values, and they are again stepping up their attacks of late.

Exhibit A: The Obama Administration has started to refer to “freedom of worship” rather than “freedom of religion” as the guaranteed First Amendment right. Michelle Boorstein first picked this up in February in Newsweek, but it has been noticed far more within the past week by both protestant and catholic writers.

Here’s the rub: by calling it “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion”, Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are restricting the rights of believers by excluding many other things that are included in “religion” but not necessarily worship, especially the right to proselytize. “Freedom of Worship” specifically doesn’t include evangelism, which means that, more than any other religious group, Christians are the primary targets of this new policy. Taken in combination with President Obama’s “We’re not a Christian nation” speech, this is alarming, to say the least.

Money quote from Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom:

"It excludes the right to raise your children in your faith; the right to have religious literature; the right to meet with co-religionists; the right to raise funds; the right to appoint or elect your religious leaders, and to carry out charitable activities, to evangelize, to have religious education or seminary training."

Exhibit B: The International Planned Parenthood Federation has a new booklet that has popped up at Girl Scout camps worldwide, known as Happy Healthy and Hot. It’s a guide for HIV positive youth who want to keep having sex. Unprotected sex. With partners who haven’t been told about the HIV status of the partner.

Don’t believe me? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t… just check out page 3 on the booklet:

Sharing your HIV status is called disclosure. Your decision about whether to disclose may change with different people and situations. You have the right to decide if, when, and how to disclose your HIV status.

There are many reasons that people do not share their HIV status. They may not want people to know they are living with HIV because of stigma and discrimination within their community. They may worry that people will find out something else they have kept secret, like they are using injecting drugs, having sex outside of a marriage or having sex with people of the same gender. People in long-term relationships who find out they are living with HIV sometimes fear that their partner will react violently or end the relationship.

How is it even remotely appropriate to tell this to Girl Scout troops? Aren’t we just asking for a rise in the HIV/AIDS epidemic?

The answer, is yes. For political reasons. And that is simply unacceptable.

Amazingly, this is the group that, along with their partners in the Playboy empire control the sex education curriculum coming out of the South Carolina Dept. of Education. The group is known as “SIECUS”, representing the partnership of Playboy and Planned Parenthood to intentionally oversex our school kids. In Playboy’s case, this means more magazine sales. In Planned Parenthood’s case, it means more abortions in their baby-killing plants. For normal parents, it’s just a nightmare.

Exhibit C: To complicate that problem just one touch further, it appears that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is pushing this agenda as well. As reported by the World Congress of Families, a UNFPA official declared the breakdown of the traditional family to be a “triumph” of “human rights” against “patriarchy.” Well, now they're pushing “International Guidelines on Sexuality Education” which seeks to promote “sexual pleasure” among five year olds.

Folks, our “freedom of religion” does guarantee us the right to teach our children what we want to, not have the sexualization of our children dictated to us by the UN and their Planned Parenthood and Playboy allies through programs like SIECUS. SIECUS bragged last year that their “allies in the SC Department of Education” would help them abolish abstinence based education in South Carolina.

Well, we’re not going to let that happen. Time to fight back.

Mick Zais and Frank Holleman are the leading candidates for Superintendent of Education. Mick and Frank – will you pledge to stand up for abstinence-until-marriage education, as mandated by South Carolina state law, or will you kowtow to the liberal agenda to undermine our parents and put our children at risk for sexually transmitted diseases?

This is an issue too important; we will be staying on this story in the coming months.

Immigration Reform, South Carolina style

2010-07-08T08:11:00.006-04:00

You would think the federal government would appreciate a little help on the immigration issue right now.

Budget cuts being what they are, and an out of control border causing havoc and mayhem to the local citizenry, you’d think the feds would tell Arizona “Thanks for the help! Let us know who we can pick up.”

And of course, you’d be spectacularly wrong. Under the Obama Regime, the federal government has no interest in fixing the immigration problem with anything other than blanket amnesty (which of course only worsens the problem in the long term, as we have already seen post-1987). To the Obama Regime, this isn’t a problem to be fixed, but a Rahm Emanuelesque crisis to be taken advantage of.

So you get the insane situation where rather than enforce its own laws and its own borders, the federal government instead puts up signs warning the locals to stay out of portions of their own country due to rampant lawlessness (above).

Let me point to Beaufort County, South Carolina as evidence that the Arizona approach should be preferred to the federal government approach. Beaufort County, fed up with the federal government’s non-intervention into immigration enforcement, decided to do its own ordinance to cut back on illegal aliens, including fines for businesses that employ illegals.

On the other end of the state, York County Sheriff Bruce Bryant has his deputies trained under section 287(g) to handle immigration cases on their own. Beaufort County is also doing this. This will result in a drop to the crime rate in both of those communities.

And yes, South Carolina’s own immigration reform act has finally come completely into fruition this month, though the Obama Regime’s likely move there is to shut down the e-Verify system that the state relies on for businesses to verify workers and the law to be enforced.

So, it seems to me that there are three things that South Carolina and her communities can do on this immigration issue to clamp down, and tell the feds “Yes, we can.”

First, in addition to the previously passed bill, South Carolina needs to pass the Arizona law. This will accomplish two things: it will put us in a position to protect ourselves, and it will give Arizona (and other states contemplating similar actions) some cover to do the same. The feds can pick on one state far more easily than they can pick on 30. Let’s get other states passing Arizona’s immigration law. I know it will be difficult, but the State also needs to pass enough funding for SLED to enforce the law. This will pay for itself in the long run with reduced costs to our Medicaid and social welfare spending.

Second, South Carolina counties should immediately begin discussing how to bring the Beaufort County immigration ordinance to their county. I have a copy, if you need one – look me up. I’ll be sending copies to the Lexington County Council to see if we can get this law passed here. If every county raised moneys similar to the Beaufort tally, you’d see far less clamoring for state dollars. Sooner or later, businesses are going to figure out that hiring illegals isn’t the money making operation they hoped it was, and you’ll start to see a drop in citizen unemployment rates as well.

Finally, every county Sheriff in South Carolina should follow Sheriff Bryant’s lead and get their deputies trained under ICE’s 287(g) program to handle these cases. The problem of criminal illegal aliens is a serious one, and 287(g) is a serious response while it lasts. (I have no faith that the Obama regime won’t pull the plug on this eventually.)

This would be a serious three-tiered approach to stopping the illegal immigration influx into South Carolina, and an effective way to address unemployment, crime, and the looming budget crisis in our state. I hope our leaders will listen.

Reprint: On Conservatism and Race

2010-07-02T09:09:00.002-04:00

This didn't make the blog last year, but it should have, and so it will. This was originally posted as a Facebook note on July 14, 2009, in the wake of the disastrous election of Audra Shay as YRNF Chair. A year later, living as I do in Senator Jake Knotts district, it seems just as fresh today.
*****

OK, so I hate having to write this at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, but it is what it is. For a kid who grew up in a house with a Biblical worldview (and thus without so much as a hint of racism), this issue is nearly alien to me. Yet I am confronted with it, and find I need to write it out.

Within the past two months, we have witnessed a meltdown within the Republican Party on the issue of race. I have multiple friends and acquaintances who have made unfortunate Facebook comments that have found their way into the media. Always there was some underlying excuse – look at the political climate, or there was some other subcontext for the comments, whether the left’s hateful treatment of Sarah Palin, the Obama Administration’s policies on spending and taxes, those on the evolution side of the creation debate, or Walmart’s decision to unionize. Whatever excuses are made, the underlying racial nature of the comments made remains inexcusable.

Folks, if we are going to reclaim the mantle of leadership in this nation, there is no room for this sort of behavior. “Conservative” does not refer to bringing some sort of single-ethnicity rule, or the exclusion of those who look different from us; rather, it refers to “conserving” the intent of our Founding Fathers when they wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

All are created equal – by Almighty God, and given rights that we today still work to secure. Governments should, Conservatives believe, exist to protect those rights and our citizen’s lives – and do little else. Liberty flourishes when government power is constrained. Economies flourish when governments tax little and spend little and Liberty is allowed to grow. Free peoples prosper; enslaved peoples do not.

And yet I read this morning about the “permanence of racism in the American experience.” I’ve seen racism come from both sides of the American ideological divide, from the left-wing attacks on Michelle Malkin's Asian ethnicity, to the anti-Semitism found on the fringes of the right and left, to the unhinged remarks of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, to what J.C. Watts condemned as the “race-baiting poverty pimps,” to what President Bush termed the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” to the Facebook comments so many of us have had to deal with in the last three months.

My friends, let this not remain. If we are to continue to build a civil society on the principles our Founders laid out – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rights from God, to all, protected by government – we must stop the ethnic divisiveness and hatred that plagues so much of the rest of our world.

The Apostle Paul makes plain in his epistles that the Christ-follower must have no place for racism or ethnic hatred. Those who in the past have abused Scripture to excuse racism miss the plain words of his letters to Galatia or Ephesus: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female: you are all one in Christ Jesus… One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and in you all.” Not divisiveness, unity. If indeed “Christ is in us, the hope of glory,” we have no room for divisions on such trivial matters as the place of our birth or the tone of our skin.

I hope that we Republicans will remember this and learn from the mistakes of the first half of this year. We cannot capture the attentions of the public, nor convince the public that we are deserving of a return to national leadership, if we cannot also get past the racism of yesteryear that has rightly and strongly been rejected by the vast majority of the American public. Our message of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility cannot be heard if it is drowned out by controversy over who should be allowed to enjoy those blessings of liberty.

I hope you will join me in this endeavor; I hope that you will take these words to heart and to work in your own community; I hope that you will share this with others.

And I hope that God will richly bless each and every one of you as you seek to follow His heart and do His will.

Putting the Band Back Together

2010-07-01T11:10:00.000-04:00

So... it's been a long time.

I haven't written for the blog in... what, 16 months?

At some point, I'll write about the campaign here. Lessons learned, friendships made, folks I just can't trust any more... It was a 95% positive experience, and that's where I'll focus the most. In that time I wound up helping start the Tea Party movement (and then see it go through some serious adolescent growing pains). I'm certain to keep commenting on that as things move forward.

And, as y'all know, I'm pretty opinionated. I'm not about to stop telling you what I think (and let the discussions begin). I've been saving up some things that I'll be writing about over the summer, on all the usual topics that long time readers will remember.

Thanks for coming back. I look forward to moving the debate forward for the sake of conservatism everywhere.

What $1T looks like

2009-02-01T09:42:00.003-05:00

With gratitude to Suitably Flip (click for larger)

Martin/Harrell - Tort Reform Returns

2009-01-29T15:12:00.003-05:00

The US Chamber of Commerce recently ranked the fifty states on a series of tort and liability issues in terms of their business friendliness.

The results? South Carolina’s ranking dropped in 2008 from 37th to 43rd, despite the tort reform and workers compensation reforms passed earlier in the decade?

Why are we ranked so low? The data points we took the most grief from included non-economic damages, the competence of our judges, and our treatment of scientific evidence. Class action lawsuits got a particular nod as well.

Here’s where that rubber meets the road – every frivolous lawsuit in South Carolina costs roughly $30K to defend. Since the median wage in the state is now hovering around $29K, this means that every single lawsuit against business costs the state roughly one job. So, the fact that we’re in the bottom ten in business friendly litigation and unemployment (currently 49th at a whopping 9.5%) at the same time makes some sense.

One other note on what’s wrong, before we get to the fix. The other problem that needs fixing relates to bad judges. In the recent Colleton Prep v. Hoover case, the SC Supreme Court, in a ruling handed down by Justice Don Beatty, found that a construction contractor was liable not for the damage that was done, but for the damage that could have been done when a roof partially collapsed. (That’s jurisprudential malfeasance, and it happens when legislators pick judges without regard to their judicial philosophy, but rather on who is scratching whose back, or comes from whose home county. But I digress…)

Into this mess steps Senator Larry Martin (along with 12 Senate co-sponsors and a probable House counterpart to be introduced next week by Speaker Harrell) with a tort reform bill S.350 that can have a solid positive impact on the business-friendly nature of our legal system.

“Martin/Harrell” – S.350 is modeled after the tort reform proposal of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and seeks to put our state on more of a nationally normed footing. That includes improvements to the way our state handles class actions, punitive damages, and admissibility of certain types of evidence. The bill includes a paragraph modeled after SC’s medical malpractice statute, giving businesses the same protective caps on non-economic damages that our doctors currently enjoy. The bill includes language worked out by Attorney General Henry McMaster to provide standards and accountability for the hiring of outside legal counsel. And, yes, the bill reverses the definitions of two bad SC Supreme Court decisions, including the “could have been” Economic Loss Rule provisions from the regrettable Colleton Prep case.

Senator Martin and Speaker Harrell should be applauded for bringing this bill to the Legislature, especially at a time when our economy needs a boost. The best kind of boost we can give is to ease the tort burdens on business that allow them to hire more workers. The House and Senate should work to pass this bill this year. We’ll be watching to make sure they do.

In Praise of Senator Jim DeMint

2009-01-28T14:16:00.003-05:00

There has been a lot going on in the past couple of months, and it seems to me that with all of the good things we’re trying to do and all of the bad things the liberals are trying to do, there’s one great guy with us in the trenches these last two months – Senator Jim DeMint.

Stopping Hillary Clinton from turning the State Department into her own private social engineering lab? Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint voted against her confirmation - one of only two Senators to stand up and do the right thing.

Stopping a tax cheat from becoming Secretary of the Treasury (and thus, nominal head of the IRS)? Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint voted against the confirmation of Timothy Geithner, even as ten of his Republican colleagues buckled.

Stopping the ill-advised TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) that the Bush Administration was shoving down Congress’ throat? Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint was the only one to consistently stand up against the bailout.

Fighting against the Obama administrations policy to allow federal tax dollars to go for overseas abortions? Didn’t work, but Senator DeMint was the elected South Carolinian who brought the amendment to the Senate floor to strip the funding. (seriously, how does a country like ours, with a trillion dollar deficit, whose economy is in the toilet, even begin to consider paying for other countries to kill babies? I just don’t understand this concept – at all. But I digress.)

Now Senator DeMint is fighting against the $1T debt-funded Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus” package (and twittering about it along the way.) I don’t expect we’ll win this one either, in the short run, but with Senator DeMint taking the right stands, we can hope it at least gets somewhat stripped down.

Keep up the good work, Senator. We may be losing these fights right now, but we absolutely appreciate having you in the trenches fighting for us. History will show that you continued to do the right things, even as all those around you lost their minds for socialist Big Government programs and bailouts.

More Government jobs than Manufacturing?

2009-01-20T10:18:00.004-05:00

graph courtesy Contrary Investor, HT: Jawa Report

The Jawas are pointing out that government employment has now surpassed manufacturing and construction sectors.

As they also point out:

What is the government's product? How well is it selling? What tax revenue does government generate (not collect)? What is the profit margin for government, and when will it begin paying for itself? What tangible good or service is the rapidly-growing government producing? Why is there a recession if government is the answer? If government is trying to compete with manufacturing as a big-time employer, then why doesn't it start generating its own income rather than taking it from productive people?
Reagan was right - the tendency for government is to grow into the closest thing to eternal life that we'll ever know on this planet. Are we better off for it? The only time government payrolls noticably decreased for any real length of time was under the Reagan Administration (blips under the others), so this is a systemic problem that crosses party lines (the two lines crossed during Bush's term, highlighting the 'success' of "compassionate conservatism").

Better Late Than Never: Ramos, Compean freed

2009-01-19T13:25:00.003-05:00

Word is breaking this afternoon that President Bush has commuted the sentences of Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who had become a cause celebre for those of us in the "border hawk" camp. Inexplicably, Fox News is reporting that the sentences are commuted not to time served, apparently, but to March 20, so they still have two months to serve. Still, commuting these sentences (if not an outright pardon) was the right thing to do, and politically all the easier with the bipartisan support these two law enforcement officers have received from across the country, especially from the entirety of the Texas House contingent.

While I don't understand the two month delay, I'm grateful that these two will get out sooner rather than later. They faced 10 year sentences if the President hadn't acted.

Random thoughts on the State of the State

2009-01-15T08:29:00.003-05:00

Had a fun evening last night. The Lexington Young Republicans (of which I am Treasurer) hosted a party last night in honor of the State of the State - it was a pre- and post- party, though most of the folks came to the pre. Now, Will likes to refer to the YRs as the "land of 1000 virgins." I hate to break it to him, but a fairly large number of the YRs in Lexington and Richland (and around the state for that matter) are married couples and young professionals. So, you can pop that perception.

We had about 45 people come through last night, including a handful of legislators (the entire Lexington House delegation plus a few others) and our esteemed Attorney General and his lovely wife. It was also great to see County Councilman John Carrigg there with his wife Beth.

We went over for the speech around 6:30. I was somewhat surprised at the number of empty seats and the ease of getting one. By the time the speech started, there were still around 50 empty seats out of the roughly 200 in the House gallery. I suppose there is less interest in a Governor's 7th State of the State, but I was still surprised.

I thought Governor Sanford did better this time around. Most of the stumbles were gone, Thomas Friedman was nowhere to be found, and he laid out a simple 5-point plan for where he wanted the state to go this year. He invoked the Obama factor with references to "Yes, we can" without naming the new presidency, which was interesting. He thanked my Representative Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine for their terrific work (against tremendous opposition) on getting roll call voting through the House (which passed 115-0 yesterday; still wonder who those 9 holdouts were...). As a result, he got more applause this year (well, that and there were two rows of YRs in the stands... heh.)

I did find it a bit different that Governor Sanford recognized his Cabinet, but not the Constitutional officers in the stands. Sitting on the front row (two rows in front of me) were Attorney General McMaster, Comptroller General Eckstrom, Treasurer Chellis, Secretary of State Hammond, and Agriculture Commissioner Weathers. I didn't see Adjutant General Spears, and I didn't see Education Super Rex, though he was clearly there for the cameras afterwards. Of course, Lt. Governor Bauer was in front, gavelling the chamber to order in the purple robes of the evening. (Bauer and Speaker Harrell really did look like two guys from the Heavens Gate cult in those robes. Very scary. Now that indigo is the state color, perhaps it's time to change the robes from purple to blue... But, I digress.)

The post-party was very interesting. The usual crowd of the restaurant/bar we were at had filtered in, mostly USC students, from the look of it. I had the pleasure of meeting Mattheus Mei of Leonardo's Notebook, and we talked Evangelical/Catholic theology for the better part of an hour. (Matt - it was a pleasure meeting you.) I also had the chance to chat with Wes Wolfe, the one-time freelance writer for the Columbia City Paper and two-time "anonymous blogger" who managed to get his identity outed both times. (In the process, I hopefully have disabused him of some of his more conspiratorial notions involving me.) Wes - it was a pleasure.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how the legislature reacts to the overall tone of the speech itself. The applause line of the night may have been "let bygones be bygones." Hopefully, in an economic crisis like the one we're facing now, the Governor and Legislature will be able to put their heads together to figure out how the state can best move forward with the least negativbe impact to the citizenry.

Oh - and thanks to Cam and Jay-dub for noticing that I was shown on TV from the gallery last night. Hopefully I looked attentive...

EPA proposes... a Federal Livestock Tax?

2009-01-07T12:46:00.003-05:00

News this week that the Environmental Protection Agency, in its usual tizzy over thoroughly discredited global warming hysteria, has proposed a revolutionary new tool in the fight against a problem that doesn't exist.

A Federal Cow Tax.

Because, y'know, it's not like we're in a recession or anything.

Nothing like taxing the food off of the table of the poor to make the economy go hummmmm.

In its worse-than-usual brilliance, the EPA is suggesting a $175 tax on cows, an $87.50 tax on bulls, and a $20 tax on hogs. (Say, is it sexist to tax female bovines at twice the price? I'd call them sexist pigs, but the pigs got taxed, too. But I digress...)

If that's not enough, the EPA wants to force Title V (Clean Air Act) licensing on any farm with more than, say, 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle, or 200 hogs. If this goes through, say goodbye to the family farm. We'll all be buying our beef from Brazil and Argentina. You think hormonal milk is bad now - how do you propose to control that if we're importing it all?

The good news is that the government is hardly unified on this point. The Department of Agriculture warned the EPA about the licensing provisions and the costs involved to consumers and farmers, and the Farm Bureaus seem to be awakened to the danger.

Still, the idiot bureaucrats responsible for this one need to be fired, and within the next ten days or so, before the next batch of global warming hysterists take charge of the agency. (For those of you who still believe the Bush Administration was "right-wing", this should pretty well prove otherwise. Again.)

For those of you who ask "what do you have against conservation" (a non-sequitur, by the way) in response to my dissection of the global warming agenda, a quick response. I have nothing against conservation. I believe personal responsibility extends to our usage of resources - and I try to live like it. But, conservation has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the hoax that is global warming. If you want to sell me on clean air or clean water or the beauty of Yosemite, do those things for their own sake, as I've argued previously. When you link your cause to something that is so clearly and dramatically a fraud, you do yourself a disservice.

Time for a real National Championship

2009-01-05T09:06:00.005-05:00

OK, so let's go non-political for a minute (well, maybe not entirely non-political, since I agree with the President-Elect on this one.)

It's time for a real national championship in college football.

We can still market it as a "Bowl Championship Series" if we want to - but it has to be a real championship, not just one game masquerading as a championship like we have now.

The bowl system we have now is failing. Just look at all of the empty seats at games in the last month - they were hard to miss in any of the wide-shots or blimp views. With the exceptions of the big major bowls, sellouts were few and far between.

Part of this is the death of the tradition of the bowls themselves. The Cotton Bowl played it's last game in the Cotton Bowl this year; they move to the new Cowboys stadium next year. The Orange and Sugar Bowls haven't been played in stadiums with those names in years. This will leave only the Rose Bowl as being played in the stadium of the same name.

Instead we're treated to a cornucopia of television induced corporate names - the papajohns.com bowl, the insight.com bowl, the Eagle Bank Bowl. Look I like Papa John's as much as anyone (had their pizza this weekend while I watched games), but that's not why I watch football.

The "traditional" New Years bowl games are now spread across a full week to maximize television viewership and eliminate competition between networks. Today is January 5 - the Fiesta Bowl is tonight. It features a Texas team that beat the Oklahoma team in the BCS Bowl against an Ohio State team that lost to both Rose Bowl participants. Yippie.

Did you know that Division I-A football is the only NCAA sport (at any division level) without a championship tournament? Any other sport, played by either gender, at any other level, and they decide the thing on the field. Just not Division I-A (now called the "FBS" - no kidding), which gets voted on by reporters. Of the 119 FBS schools, 68 got into the record 34 bowls this year. That's not a "commitment to excellence", it's a commitment to mediocrity.

If you watched the Sugar or Rose Bowls this year, you watched two teams with legitimate claims to the mythical "national championship" - the USC Trojans and the Utah Utes. Personally, though I am a Trojan fan, I think Utah has the stronger case, having beaten 6 bowl teams en route to an unbeaten season as Sugar Bowl champs. SEC fans - how many times have you lamented (rightly!) that your conference champion who went on to win the Sugar Bowl was jobbed out of a shot at the title? Utah is in exactly that position this year - unbeaten, with a stifling defense and a superlative offense, knocking off TCU, BYU, Oregon State (who beat USC), Air Force, Colorado State, and finally Alabama in that Sugar Bowl. Oh, and in case you think they were scheduling weaklings, they started the season by beating Michigan - in Ann Arbor. (granted, a bad year for Michigan, but Utah couldn't have known that when they scheduled them.)

I'm not saying we eliminate the bowls - those cities have been hosting games for the better part of a century in some cases. Rather, I'm saying use fifteen of them as the sites for a 16-team national championship tournament.

Now, when choosing sites, you have to go with the most bang for your buck. 5 Bowl sites have chosen "national champions" in the past - the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, and Fiesta. I would propose rotating the national championship final between those five sites, as is mostly done now, but as the end of the real tournament, much like the Final Four sites in basketball. The other four bowls would still host games every year - two of them would host semi-finals, and two quarter-finals.

That leaves ten more sites to choose, who would each host one quarterfinal every 5 years, and first round games in the other four years. How do we choose 10 sites from the remaining 29 bowls? Well, it's not that hard, once you think about it. Some of these sites host 2 games on one fiels a week apart - that knocks us down to about twenty sites. Then take out the obviously bad choices - the atrocity of a blue field in Boise, the possibility of a game in Toronto, and the awful seams in the field of the Alamo Dome, for example. With a small nod to the history of some of these games, as well as the warm weather factor (for fans and local tourism, this just makes more sense to draw people in) it's then easy to pick ten:

Atlanta (Peach)
Charlotte (Meineke)
El Paso, TX (Sun)
Houston, TX (Texas)
Jacksonville (Gator)
Memphis (Liberty)
Nashville (Music City)
Orlando (Capital One)
San Diego (Holiday Bowl)
Tampa (Outback)

Honorable mention: Shreveport, LA, home of the Independence Bowl

Personally, I schedule it out basing the four quarterfinal games on New Years Day. move ten to fourteen days back for the first round games (giving a Christmas break), then one week to ten days later for the semifinals (avoiding the NFL playoffs), and another week after that for the championship final. It adds only one week to the full schedule. I would also take out one regular season non-conference game to make up for it.

As for the rest of the bowls - still have your games. Still have the Poulan Weedeater Bowl, the insight.com bowl, or the GMAC bowl, featuring the usual two mediocre teams that usually wouldn't play in a bowl game (except for this year's Credit Union Poinsettia thriller between Boise State and TCU). We'll just treat them like College Football's version of the NIT - consolation prizes for the teams that just weren't good enough to make the Big Dance.

**

So who would make up the sixteen teams to play for the title? Any decision making organism would need to take into account a few things - the human polls and the computer rankings (as the BCS does now), the conference championships (with special deference to the conferences that have championship games), as well as the win-loss records, and possibly a "strength of schedule" component.

I would propose that each of the eleven conference champions would get in. This year that would mean:

Virginia Tech (ACC)
Oklahoma (Big 12)
Cincinnati (Big East)
Penn State (Big 10)
East Carolina (Conference USA)
Buffalo (MAC)
Utah (Mountain West)
USC (Pac-10)
Florida (SEC)
Troy (Sun Belt)
Boise State (WAC)

That would leave five teams for the BCS formula to determine - not to arbitrarily pick a champion, but to pick the next best 5 teams to get wild card slots.

Using the something like the current formula - percentage of the human polls plus the percentage of the computer rankings plus win-loss percentage, I pick five wildcards: Texas, Alabama, Texas Tech, Ohio State, and TCU.

Then you rank the sixteen teams, using the same formula to determine seeding... and Voila! you have a bracket.

So... Which would you rather see - that tournament or South Florida vs. Memphis in the Magicjack bowl in a half-empty dome?

Yeah, me too.

**

There is, of course, another option - adding a "conference champion" component to the system - 1.0 points for any winner of a conference championship game, 0.5 points for any other conference champ. Then rank the teams, and pick the top 16, regardless of who won their conference. That would encourage more conference championship games the first week of December - and more "play-in" games. It would also eliminate the most questionable of the conference champs while leaving the possibility that smaller conference champs could still get a shot.

This year, that would replace East Carolina, Buffalo, and Troy with Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech, and BYU. Just for fun, that bracket looks like this:

Your thoughts?

Picture of the Year

2008-12-30T09:17:00.004-05:00

CAPTION CONTEST...

Sign seen at anti-Israeli protest in Manhattan yesterday. (or, perhaps, against the prune industry? who knows...)
(H/T: LGF, who accurately pins it as "numb-skulled hatred")

Possibly related: Mark Steyn reports in National Review that 75% of Pakistani Muslims in Britain are married to their own first cousins...

Happy New Year, everybody.

London Daily Telegraph: 2008 to be remembered as the year Man-made Global Warming was disproved

2008-12-29T08:18:00.002-05:00

Great piece by Chris Booker in yesterday's Telegraph:

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

Bush announces 19 pardons - but where are Ramos and Compean?

2008-12-23T19:10:00.004-05:00

Matt Lewis points out that Bush's latest list of 19 pardons leaves off three major names we're looking for in the waning days of the Bush Presidency.

The two we're looking for closest, the ones who deserve it, perhaps more than any Presidential Pardon has been deserved in any of our lifetimes, are Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. Ramos and Compean are currently looking at 20 years in prison because (get this) they shot a drug dealer who was shooting at them in a cross border bust gone wrong.

As Matt puts it, this is a "no-brainer." The case itself is a terrible miscarriage of justice (the drug dealer lived, though its doubtful he deserves to), and puts a damper on our ability to enforce our southern border.

So... as the President pushes out another batch of pardons, the question has to be asked - why not Ramos and Compean? We're pardoning dead guys who helped Israel become a nation, but not two guys who help protect our own nation? (FYI: I have nothing against pardoning Charles Winters, especially since he's already moved on to the Great Weapons Depot In The Sky, and since Reagan and Clinton have already pardoned his two fellow smugglers... but I digress.)

Forcing these two agents to spend another Christmas in prison is not justice, and President Bush should be ashamed on this one. Hopefully these two are released before the end of his term, but this does ask the question - what is he waiting for?

As Matt tweets, "If Marc Rich can be pardoned..." I couldn't agree more.

***

The other name we're waiting for is Scooter Libby. Scooter doesn't deserve prison either, in my estimation, as we already know he wasn't the source of the leaks (Richard Armitage was.) Yet, he gets nailed for perjury (on an unrelated matter) and the prosecutor gets his scalp. Libby is less important to me than Ramos and Compean, simply because they were in the line of duty, and Libby is "just" a political appointee. Still, it'd be awfully nice if these three guys got out in time to celebrate a New Year...

Bill Kristol on the Obama shift from Rev. Wright to Rev. Warren

2008-12-20T21:32:00.003-05:00

Bill Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard:

Is this smart politics on Obama's part? Sure. Does it mean Obama has studied the mistakes of his predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton? Probably. Obama may have learned from their examples that, even though everyone says the economic crisis has put social issues on a far back burner, mishandling those issues can severely damage one's presidency: Recall gays in the military under Clinton and the IRS ruling on Christian schools under Carter...

No conservative should kid himself about what the Obama administration is going to be like. Many of its key policies will be anathema to social conservatives. But social conservatives need to persuade some social moderates, and social undecideds, and social conflicteds, and social uncertains of the reasonableness of conservative concerns, and the sincerity of conservatives' claims that they seek progress in these areas, not merely conflict. There will be plenty of occasions to draw lines with the Obama administration. For now, it might be a good idea to offer a few olive branches to Obama as well.

And the selection of Rick Warren may turn out to have significance beyond short-term political maneuvering. One can see this from the hysteria on the left and among gay activists. They sense that Obama isn't willing to sign on to their campaign to delegitimize, to cast out beyond the pale of polite society, anyone who opposes same-sex marriage--and in particular, anyone (like Warren) who supported Proposition 8 in California, the initiative that overturned the California Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage.

The assault on Prop 8 supporters has been extraordinary in its mean-spiritedness and extremism--but the left knows what it's doing. The purpose has been to intimidate people with an opposing point of view from defending their position. To be against same-sex marriage, even against the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage, is to be a bigot. As one leftwinger said on CNN, Warren is a "hatemonger" comparable to "the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan." Or, as the Human Rights Campaign's Brad Luna told Byron York of National Review, dismissing the fact that the benediction will be delivered by the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who is more friendly to gay marriage: "I don't think any Jewish Americans would feel much comfort in knowing that an anti-Semite is starting the inauguration with an invocation, but we're going to end it with a rabbi." So the claim is, opposing same-sex marriage is tantamount to being a racist or an anti-Semite.

Making that charge is at the heart of the agenda of the gay lobby. They don't want to debate same-sex marriage. They want to demonize its opponents. Ironically, Lowery himself, who is a (somewhat equivocal) supporter of gay marriage, refuses to equate the gay rights and the civil rights movements: "Homosexuals as a people have never been enslaved because of their sexual orientation," he told the Associated Press. "They may have been scorned; they may have been discriminated against. But they've never been enslaved and declared less than human."

...Conservatives have to be ready to stand up for themselves--and for each other--if and when the left comes at them from the academy, Hollywood, and the media. Obama's invitation to Rick Warren doesn't mean his administration won't put a heavy thumb on the left side of the scale in our cultural conflicts. It doesn't even mean that organs of the federal government, over which Obama will of course be presiding, won't try to stifle nonconforming opinions. But the Warren invitation means that one can at least appeal to Obama's own precedent against suppressing out-of-favor views.

The left senses that the invitation to Rick Warren is a blow to their effort to establish a soft tyranny of "correct" opinion, to enforce society-wide political orthodoxy, on social issues. They're right. This isn't the time for conservatives to snipe at Obama's motives. It's time to welcome him into the American mainstream, to salute the president-elect's progress from Reverends Wright to Warren.

On the Inaugural Invocation

2008-12-18T10:22:00.003-05:00

Some days politics and theology intersect – and this is one of those days. For those of you who have somehow missed that I’m an Evangelical, this may be a difficult post, but please bear with me – there’s a political twist here, I promise.

In the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, Greece, he writes:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not
be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor
homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor
revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.

In other words, people who are defined by their sin do not enter the kingdom of God.

This makes sense in context with another passage, in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ
lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in
the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

So here’s the context – for those of us who have become Christians, it is not our sin that defines us any more, but our life in Christ. We are no longer listed under “sinner” (though in our imperfect human nature, we will continue to sin – just less and less as we surrender to Christ and are changed), but we are now listed as “Christian” or more literally - “Christ-follower.” This is borne out in the next few lines of the Corinth letter:

And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you
were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God….For
you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your
spirit, which are God’s.

In other words, God loves us too much to leave us in the sin we started out in, and He loves us so much He sent His son (whose birth we celebrate at this time of year) to die as a replacement for us, His death the penalty we would have paid if we were to die without that forgiveness. In the process, our identity is changed – from being identified with our sin to being identified with Christ. We are to love the sinner (because we all were there before we were “washed” and “bought with a price”), even as we hate the evil of the sin itself, whether it be murder, theft, extortion or homosexuality, as Paul lists above.

This does get tricky sometimes. In our modern world, Hollywood culture often tries to make these sins feel acceptable – whether the violence of the Godfather or the Sopranos, the adultery of Desperate Housewives or Dallas, or the theft/extortion of Leverage or the Italian Job.

There are Christian leaders who have gotten this issue right – and Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California is one of them. Now, I must admit I’ve had my issues with Pastor Rick (I think his “seeker-sensitive” church model waters down the Bible, I think his “40 Days of Purpose” book was a bit thin, and I think he gets off on tangential environmental issues a little too much). But all in all, Rick’s a good guy trying to do his best. Rick is known (among other things) for an outreach to the homosexual community that loves the individual while condemning the sin – because God loves the sinners He came to save from their sins. To love the sin is to hate the sinner – because it condemns them to continue in their sins (and without God).

In that light, Pastor Rick worked hard for the passage of Proposition 8 in California this year, a proposition which reaffirmed a past decision of California’s voters (on DOMA – the Defense of Marriage Act) by constitutionally defining marriage as solely between one man and one woman.

I also think Rick was the best debate moderator in the 2008 Presidential cycle. But I digress…

So, yesterday we learned that President-Elect Barack Obama, continuing his headlong rush towards the middle of the political spectrum, has tapped Pastor Rick to do the invocation at the inaugural. I happen to think this is a good thing – and I pray that Rick Warren is one of the voices the new President will listen to in the coming Administration – especially on the policy issues relating to abortion and homosexuality, which Rick is strong on, as mentioned above.

Not everyone is so happy, though, reports Ben Smith of Politico:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your
inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights
Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of
disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given
the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

…“It’s a huge mistake,” said California gay rights activist Rick Jacobs, who
chairs the state’s Courage Campaign. “He’s really the wrong person to lead
the
president into office.”

…“His presence on the inauguration stand is a slap in the faces of the millions
of GLBT voters who so enthusiastically supported him,” (the editor of the
Washington Blade, Kevin) Naff wrote, referring to gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered people. “This tone-deafness to our concerns must not be tolerated.
We have just endured eight years of endless assaults on our dignity and equality
from a president beholden to bigoted conservative Christians. The election was
supposed to have ended that era. It appears otherwise.”

The people who have allowed themselves to be defined by their sin (in this case, homosexuality) are lashing out at the one who is defined by Christ. In another of Paul’s letters – this one to the church in Rome – he explains why this is to be expected.

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and
four-footed animals and creeping things.
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

The logical flow of this section? That those who practice homosexuality do so because of a conscious rejection of God and His natural order. In response to that rejection, God “gives them up to vile passions.” (Note how similar this passage is to the list in the Corinth letter – people defined by their sin rather than defined by their new life in Christ.)

So, it makes sense that the people who define themselves by their sin (“LGBT/GLBT voters”) would lash out at “bigoted conservative Christians” like Rick Warren (who are defined by Christ). It is impossible for people of faith to stay true to God (and His Word) and make those folks happy as long as they remain in opposition to God by choosing to be defined (and defiled) by their sin. (They say “Open minds”, Paul says “Debased minds”; I’m with the Apostle Paul on this one.)

Our choice as Christ-followers then, must be to continue to love them, while standing against their attempts in the culture and government to legitimize their lifestyle of sin, whether redefining marriage or adoption or employment rights or using tax dollars for certain tourism promotions.

So (for the first time) I give kudos to President-Elect Obama for his choice for the inaugural invocation. I fear it will be the last time, but hope it won’t – as I hope and pray that the reasonable (and frankly moderate) voice of Pastor Warren is one that the new President will listen to and hear, as Rev. Billy Graham was (at least in name) to Obama’s Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton. We pray this with the words of Solomon, the author of Proverbs, in mind:

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.

President-Elect Obama could do far worse than Pastor Warren, and frankly not much better.

All Scriptures quoted above in New King James Version.

Rove on the need for fresh GOP strategery

2008-12-11T08:52:00.003-05:00

Not too much comment needed on this, other than to say, I think Karl Rove in today's Wall Street Journal is right on point. Anyone running for RNC (or SCGOP) Chair needs to clip this out and remind themselves of it at regular intervals... Emphasis is mine.

What a difference a month makes. Since November's election, the GOP is three wins, no losses.

The first win came in Georgia, where Sen. Saxby Chambliss crushed his Democratic opponent by 15 points in a run-off election on Dec. 2. The other wins came in Louisiana congressional races on Saturday. One was in a Republican-leaning district in the state's northwest corner. Democrats outspent the GOP three to two and still lost. In the other, Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao defeated nine-term Democrat William Jefferson in a district where John McCain received 24% of the vote.

These victories have boosted Republican spirits. So has Sen. Norm Coleman maintaining a narrow lead in the Minnesota recount, leadership elections that injected new blood into the GOP congressional hierarchies, and a positive race (so far) for Republican National Committee chairman. Republican governors emerged from meeting in Miami energized, optimistic and eager for the 38 gubernatorial races in the next two years.

But many challenges lie ahead. Much of the GOP's work is away from Capitol Hill, governor's offices and party committees. In recent years, Democrats have done a much better job of tending the networks, initiatives and institutions important to political success. There are at least seven important functions, communications channels or institutions the GOP must launch or strengthen.

First, Republicans need something similar to Democracy Corps, a James Carville and Stan Greenberg creation that uses polls that are made public to help party leaders pick themes likely to resonate with voters and draw attention to the Democratic narrative on issues.

Second, while it's the responsibility of all, someone must take the lead on training candidates and party leaders and nurturing their focus on ideas. Under its founder, Newt Gingrich, GOPAC once did this. It needs to be revitalized or its original mission taken up by a fresh group.

Third, more than one out of five Americans eligible to vote is unregistered, meaning there are millions of unregistered Republicans. The RNC once used sophisticated "micro-targeting" to develop a list of 291,000 unregistered Texans who voted in the GOP primary or were registered Republicans in the state or community where they last lived. There were 1.3 million more likely Texas Republicans with no primary voting history. The GOP needs to take this nationwide. New ways must be found to encourage party organizations and independent efforts to focus on registration.

Unions and third-party groups spent $194 million on independent ads for Democrats over the past two years, giving them a five-to-two advantage over similar third-party assistance to GOP candidates. This doesn't include hundreds of millions in unreported expenditures by unions.

So fourth, GOP fund-raisers and allies must create cost-effective independent expenditure groups for House and Senate races, or Republicans will sink under the weight of negative ads, mail, calls and canvassing.

Fifth, there must be a special focus on state legislative races. Legislators elected in 2009 and 2010 will redistrict Congress and themselves in 2011. Today, there are 25 state Senates where either party's majority is smaller than 10 seats and 21 state Houses where the majority is less than 20 seats. In eight states, legislative control is divided, with one party controlling the Senate and the other the House. State parties and congressional delegations have a vital stake in recruiting, training and funding effective legislative campaigns over the next two years.

Sixth, new media require attention. Younger voters are increasingly getting their information from the Web -- twice as many 18-24 year olds get their news online than from newspapers. Political Web 1.0 was about faster and easier communications and Republicans had the advantage. Political Web 2.0 is about networking and Democrats grabbed the lead. The party that figures out where Web 3.0 goes will grab the decisive high ground in high-tech warfare.

Finally, ideas are always the most important currency of politics and never more so than after a party loses. The relationship between GOP policymakers and conservative policy thinkers should be strengthened.

It's not just conservative think tanks. There are independent scholars, academics, staff in governor's offices and state legislatures, and knowledgeable people throughout the country who can help make the party's conservative principles relevant today.

To do this effectively, candidates and party leaders must remember who they need to reach -- young voters who tilt Democratic; Hispanics and Catholics; and suburban and exurban families who were bedrock Republicans, but who have become disenchanted with both parties.

The GOP has the right principles to become the majority party again. What it must have are fresh, energetic voices who apply those principles to meeting the needs of American families. And it must put in place the infrastructure that will take that message and amplify it.

Those are challenging tasks -- but the last month has reminded us that the GOP remains formidable. The age of Obama may have begun, but so, perhaps, has the GOP comeback.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

Random thoughts on a Wednesday morning

2008-12-10T09:44:00.004-05:00

When I was SC Communications Director for the Fred Thompson campaign, there were only three journalist blogs worth following in the state - Dan Hoover, David Stanton, and Brad Warthen. Hoover was "let go" last week, Stanton this week; can Warthen be far behind? (They do "go in threes", y'know...)

In all seriousness, losing Hoover and Stanton (on the heels of the retirement of Lee Bandy) leaves this state with no senior leadership in the journalistic community. The AP's Jim Davenport now inherits the title of "SC's best political reporter" (followed by the Young Guns: John O'Connor of The State and Ian Leslie in Beaufort; Jason Spencer in Spartanburg ranks a distant third in that group...); none of those three have the institutional knowledge that Davenport has (or that Hoover, Stanton, and Bandy had, for that matter), but Jim gets lost in the process stories a little too often for my liking (probably because he works for AP - I blame the system not the man - Jim's a good guy). The new generation of journalists has its work cut out for it, and Jim has his work cut out for him as the new Leader of the SC Pack.

Now, Adam Fogle over at the Palmetto Scoop revels in the blogosphere's resilience, but misses the point entirely. Political blogs (especially consultant driven outlets like Fogle's) can never fill the void that honest journalism should have been filling (but largely hasn't in years) - unbiased, unvarnished truth-telling (and we've had it better in SC because of Hoover, Stanton, Davenport and Bandy than the MSM in most states).

On the internet front, FITS comes closest in this state - and anyone who reads that has had too many eyefuls of Chargers cheerleaders and Pam Anderson to consider it a serious, long-term, unbiased news outlet - traffic or no traffic. SCHotline is the state's Drudge Report - but that's not reporting stories, that's collecting stories. I don't think we've seen where an honest internet news outlet can go in this state - but I hope we get the chance soon...

***

Note: I'm an opinion writer. I've never claimed to be a journalist.

***

Speaking of Adam Fogle, he's tearing up Governor Mark Sanford again today. Adam, you do realize he's not running for re-election, right? That second term is safely locked away...

Does make you wonder why Adam's so hung up on the Governor (though at least he's not as mean-spirited about it as the unhinged (and new leading Indigo Girl) Ross Shealy). I think you could almost hear Adam's head getting ready to explode when Attorney General McMaster dropped Sanford's name as potential Presidential material the other day...

***

Speaking of Presidential candidates - here's my early line on the 2012 Republican nomination:

Sanford: 4-1
Jindal: 4-1
Palin: 4-1
Pawlenty: 10-1
Huckabee: 20-1
Romney: 20-1
Giuliani: 25-1
Field: 100-1

It's got to be a proven, reform-minded, socially and fiscally conservative Beltway outsider with experience as an executive this time, boys and girls; Senators and Congresscritters need not apply. Those who lost in 2008 probably also need not apply, though I'm sure some will try.

***

Unsolicited advice for Gov. Huckabee: lose the TV show. All you're currently providing is an excellent reason to look elsewhere in '12, as well as taped fodder for future opponents.

***

While I'm laying odds, the early line on the 2010 Rep. Governor nomination:

Prohibitive Favorites:
Barrett: 4-1
Bauer: 4-1
McMaster: 4-1

Longshots:
Jimmy Merrill, Tumpy Campbell, Jake Knotts, Dr. Oscar Lovelace, and the long rumored but as yet "unnamed businessman" putting $2M of his own money to build name ID...

Winner to face the survivor of a Rex/Tenenbaum/Jimmy Smith brawl on the D side. Should be a fun cycle to watch.

Chance of Rep hold: 75%

***

Not on this list: Bobby Harrell. After last week's performance (stripping committee assignments from two Lexington County conservatives - Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine), he'll never be able to set foot in Lexington County again and be taken seriously, and certainly not as a candidate for statewide office. Somebody needs to spend the next two years figuring out how to replace the Speaker.

To bring the discussion full circle - when Mark Sanford runs for President, he can point to his relationship with Speaker Harrell as a reason to be supported. The Speaker's actions this week validate all of the criticism he has taken (by FITS, the Policy Council and elsewhere) for being part of the "Big Government Republican" problem. Just as Palin can say she stood up to the Murkowskis and the Stevens of the world, and Jindal to the corruption of the LA legislature, Sanford will say he stood up to the Bobby Harrells of the world - and voters will get it, because they're hungry for fiscal sanity - including the kinds of accountability and openness in government that Harrell has now proven himself so firmly deadset against. Honestly, it makes me wonder why Harrell's ear is so tone-deaf on this issue - he's a smarter politician than this.

***

Of course, if he stays Speaker, he's still the most powerful man in the State... Mayor of Importantille, indeed...

***

Great week for Corrupto-crats. First Dollar Bill Jefferson gets voted out, now Gov Blagojevich gets outed by the US Attorney for "auctioning off the Senate seat"... Nice to know Chicago is the same (cesspool of corruption) town it's always been.

***

So, today is a "Day without a Gay?" (and this impacts my life, how exactly?)

If we're really, really lucky, the firm of Vierdsen, Lydecker, Mattheus and Prozac takes the day off from blogging... (notverybright having vacated the sphere last month)

...Yeah, I don't actually think we're that lucky either...

...though one wonders with unemployment numbers running where they are right now, how many businesses who have people call in homosexual today decide tomorrow is a good day to lay off that particular headache and recruit a more stable workforce from the currently unemployed (and probably more desperate for - and willing to - work). Just sayin'...

Random Thoughts on President-Elect Hopenchange

2008-12-01T11:04:00.004-05:00

A few thoughts while I watch the Prez-Elect introduce his new National Security team...

It's funny (and somewhat encouraging) to me to see how quickly Obama has stuck the knife in the collective back of the Left in his headlong dive towards the middle. Iraq War? Hey, looks like the surge worked and we won - oh, and we're keeping Defense Secretary Gates. (Interesting, isn't it? that Democrats two Administrations running have chosen Republicans to run the Defense Department... Even Democrats know you can't trust Democrats to run the military.)

Hispanics in the cabinet? Probably, but not that pesky Bill Richardson as Secretary of State - we'll put Hillary in for that one. (That has to be the most stunning stab in the back of the lot - Richardson is the most qualified Democrat to be SecState; he backs Obama over Hillary; Obama thanks him by... overlooking him for Hillary? Wow...)

Overturning don't ask, don't tell? Too soon to talk about that... Freedom of Choice Act? Well, we're not sure there's a consensus... Undo the Bush tax cuts? Y'know, a recession might not be the best time to do that...

The exhilaration at electing Obama is already wearing off for the left - making this perhaps the first administration whose honeymoon is ending before the inauguration.

***

Of course, that's if there is an inauguration. This pesky birth certificate thing is getting more steam than it should - and now we hear the Supreme Court might hear it this week? A few days before the Electoral College meets? Granted, very little news reporting is going on with this story, so much of what's going around is by email, (or WorldNetDaily) and of questionable repute. Still - this is a story that just won't die - even after the reprinted copy of the birth certificate was released by the campaign. (And was immediately attacked as a fake by critics.)

Dan has already posted the link to the Kenyan ambassador's unbelievable blunder in telling a reporter that Obama's Kenyan birthplace is already a national attraction, and that Obama's paternal grandmother insists he was born in Kenya. (Notable - Obama's maternal grandmother insisted he was born in Hawaii.)

Personally, I still can't get past the Honolulu Advertiser announcing the birth the next day (August 4, 1961). Many questions still arise (why is the hospital still unknown, why seal the records, where's the original), and Obama should put this behind him by coming clean about this whole thing. In my own estimation though, the preponderance of the evidence suggests Obama was born in Hawaii, to an American citizen mother, when he says he was, and is therefore Constitutionally allowed to be President.

***

...which may be more than we can say for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, as it turns out. Pete Williams (NBC analyst, and former State Department spokesman) notes Article One, Section Six from the US Constitution:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Since the salary for cabinet secretaries has been increased while Clinton was a Senator, she would be constitutionally barred from serving. Question: do Senators decide not to confirm her over this, or does this one wind up in Court? I'm guessing the latter - the politically expedient thing to do is confirm her "in a spirit of bipartisanship" (blah blah, etc), and let's face it - the Senate isn't known for doing things that are anything other than politically expedient. Still - it will be interesting to see this one wind up before the Supremes.

Global Warming Hoax, Part 3567

2008-11-17T08:16:00.004-05:00

News out this weekend that the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by Dr. James Hansen (a Global Warming Buddy of former VP Al Gore), misreported it's data for October. GISS, without any apparent irony, declared October of 2008 "the warmest on record."

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or "the people whose burueaucratic title actually allows them to comment on things like the weather," declared it the "70th warmest October of the last 114," which mathematically sounds a lot like "below average" to me.

The GISS numbers apparently took Russian data from September and repeated it (day for day), making the October numbers the same as the previous, and warmer month. (There are these things called "seasons"; apparently, it normally gets colder this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere. Who knew?)

Turns out that, in the US alone, October had 63 local snowfall records and 115 record low temperatures (while Arctic ice sheets were 30% thicker than last year.) GISS is scrambling to try to change their numbers to make up for the mistake after "climate skeptics" called them on the fraud. (Hurray for Climate Skeptics!)

GISS website now proudly proclaims that "Research at GISS emphasizes a broad study of global climate change." The UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses GISS as one of it's four data points, even though we now know that GISS has been fudging the numbers, probably at the behest of the Climate Crazies led by Mr. Gore and Dr. Hansen (as well as Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chair of the IPCC who has no known climate qualifications; The London Telegraph describes his prior employment as "railway engineer".)

US taxpayers should not have to continue paying for intentionally skewed research at GISS. Republicans in Washington: if you want to stand up for fiscal responsibility, here's an agency for which you should immediately cut off all funding. I know it won't pay for a bailout package, but at least it's something.

On the Election Results

2008-11-07T19:29:00.002-05:00

OK, so this was supposed to be a You-Tube style video... we even shot it (fireside, no less). Sadly, the new technology we were trying out has some glitches (like, the camera and the new laptop don't want to talk to each other...)

So, instead of a new web video you get... the transcript of a video that never will be seen. Go figure.

Enjoy anyways.

*****

Hello. My name is Joshua Gross. I live in Lexington, South Carolina.

I’m talking with you today to share my thoughts on this election and to call you to action as a result of what happened yesterday.

For the last eight years, President George W. Bush has led America through difficult times, fighting a two-front war in Asia, after the deadliest terrorist attack in our nation’s history and dealing with numerous natural disasters at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, those crises left our President without bargaining chips when it came to dealing with corrupt Washington politicians in Congress. When those politicians came asking for money, President Bush apparently felt he had no choice but to give in to those demands, for fear of losing support for an increasingly unpopular war, despite the successes that war faced on the ground.

As a direct result, the Bush years will be remembered for their bipartisan Washington corruption, and for the massive load of federal debt left behind in their wake. Our national debt now stands at ten trillion dollars. In budgetary terms, the federal government is now five times as large as it was when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980 on his message that the Government was too big and spent too much. The recent bipartisan Wall Street bailout alone was $100B larger than the entire 1980 federal budget.

Yesterday’s election results can rightly be judged as the repudiation of President Bush’s policies (and his willing Republican accomplices in Congress) in exchange for amorphous promises of “hope” and “change”.

Now our country faces the farthest left-wing Socialist government in our history – top to bottom, led by Obama, Reid and Pelosi. If you’re hoping that Harry Reid is the Voice of Reason among those three, you are indeed in very deep trouble.

We in the conservative movement need to realize that the Founding Fathers vision of liberty was not what voters repudiated yesterday – they rejected what they saw as a third Bush term – hardly a conservative notion. Exit polls tell us that voters saw Republicans as “having lost our way” or being inept in governance. Only 9% of Americans thought Republicans were “too conservative.”

So,what do we need to do as conservatives? We need to get back to the basics our Founding Fathers intended. We don’t need to be all things to all people – we need to be all things to the people in our conservative coalition. We need to be liberty-minded conservatives first and Republicans second. We need to realize that power for its own sake must never be the answer we seek; rather we seek to protect the rights and responsibilities of the individual free American to seek life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the manner that he or she sees fit.

In the past, our conservative coalition has stood on four legs of a stool. We must reaffirm our commitment to all four of those legs if we are to succeed.

We need to continue to stand up for life and for natural marriage. We need to stand against the corruption of higher taxes and Big Government Socialism while we stand for the dreams of individual liberty and responsibility embedded in our Constitution. We need to continue to stand for a strong military and against the threat of Islamist Sharia. And we need to provide for the basic needs of a nation, securing our borders and ensuring the rule of law. Over the next four years, we are going to have ample opportunity to fight each of these battles at every level of government.

We need to make these fights under a new generation of leaders at every level, from town councils to the U.S. Senate, in government and at the grassroots level of party politics.

We need new leaders in Congress who will stand up against the onslaught of Socialism over the next two years and lead under the banner of conservative vision.

We need new leaders in state legislatures – here in South Carolina and around the country – who will learn from the mistakes of Washington Republicans and stop the out of control government spending. This means making difficult and sometimes politically unpopular choices that the left will demagogue. Those choices must still be made, and must be explained in the larger framework of liberty and individual empowerment.

And we need new leaders at every level within our Party, from the precincts to the RNC. The conservative movement can retake our primacy within the structure of the Republican Party, but it will require focused effort on our part.

The character of this new generation of leaders will be forged in the fires of fierce opposition as we stand up for what is right. We will need to be reform minded – keeping in mind Lord Acton’s warning about the corruption of absolute power. And we will need to stand up for the values that unite us as conservatives.

I hope to be one of those leaders. And I hope that you will too. We have much work to be done, and many who will oppose us at every turn. I hope you will join us anyways.

May God Bless each of you, and may He bless the United States of America.

Obama's Self-Attack Ad

2008-11-04T07:49:00.001-05:00

Speaks for itself. Great stuff by Mary Katherine Ham.

Vote today! and Vote McCain/Palin!

Why the NRA backed McCain (or why Barack Obama will lose Florida - and maybe PA and Ohio too?)

2008-10-31T17:33:00.004-04:00

Clip of the Day: Barack Obama telling NPR in Chicago that he would ban Concealed Weapons Permits.

Second Amendment fans aren't going to like that...

Cleaning Up Republican Corruption: Stevens and the Skinheads?

2008-10-28T16:45:00.005-04:00

This is Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. He posed for this picture... seriously. Apparently, VERY seriously.

Senator Ted is the Republican that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin keeps talking about - you remember the quote "I've fought against corruption against the good old boy network in my state - even against corruption in my own party!" Yeah, in case you missed it, Senator Ted is that corruption.

And now he's going to prison, after being found guilty of seven felonies. Not sure what the law in Alaska is, but it's ironic that he might not be able to vote for himself next week, though apparently, he'll still be allowed to remain on the ballot. I think we can rate that one a "Probable Democrat pickup".

He's facing up to 35 years in prison, though at age 80, that's pretty unlikely.

Senator Stevens is also the Father of the Bridge to Nowhere, as the former Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He's the King of Pork, and now he's going to prison. This is a good thing, even if his actions weren't.

Senator Stevens also made a point of requesting a speedy trial so that the outcome would be known before the election. Gee, thanks, Ted. Republicans everywhere truly appreciate your gesture. Now go away. Yes, that way. Up the river.

***

Speaking of morons trying to affect elections, did you catch the news about these two nutjobs? Apparently they wanted to murder 102 African-Americans culminating in the assassination of Dear Leader Himself.

Apparently the numbers 88 and 14 have some sort of meaning for Neo-Nazi skinhead types (who knew?), and when you add those two numbers, you get 102. (My fellow public school grads: trust me on this one). When you add their ages, you get 39, which amazingly also corresponds to their collective IQ.

At any rate, and all joking aside, one does hope the three of them will become bestest buds in federal prison, where all three deserve to remain for a very long time...

Fred Thompson on Danger of Obama Presidency

2008-10-24T16:38:00.003-04:00

I know, I know... he lost. I still can't help but wish he was the one on top of this ticket.

UPDATED: HOAX!! The Face of the Coming Obama Thugocracy

2008-10-24T08:52:00.005-04:00

UPDATE: WE'VE BEEN HOAXED!

KDKA is reporting that Ms. Todd made the whole thing up. One does wonder what would drive her to do it - since hoaxes rarely work (with the notable exception of global warming...)

The other examples I cite below remain intact, however...

JDG

*****

Study this face.

Look at it closely.

This could be you.

This is the face of Ashley Todd, a McCain/Palin volunteer (not even a paid staffer) who was viciously attacked and mugged in Pittsburgh on Wednesday night.

Pittsburgh police say the 6-foot-4-inch thug punched, kicked and then literally lashed out at the woman after glancing at her McCain for president bumper sticker.

A photo of Todd shows a crimson scar of the letter “B” etched backwards on her right cheek. She also has a black eye and her face is puffy.

Let me see if I can get this straight.

Joe the Plumber asks a question in his own driveway and gets attacked by the New York Times.

Ashley Todd gets attacked for having a McCain sticker on her car.

York County's McCain campaign HQ attacked.

Central Florida man gets his house shot up after putting up McCain yard signs.

The McCain/Palin "Straight Talk Express" Bus shot up in New Mexico.

Clearwater, Florida man's Lexus vandalized over McCain/Palin sticker.

...and we're supposed to ignore this candidate's ties to an unrepentant domestic terrorist?

The latest on climate data

2008-10-21T09:09:00.003-04:00

Break out the fur coats, kids, the world's getting colder... or as Lorne Gunter puts it "Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof".

ICYMI: Washington Times on "Obama's Kenya Ghosts"

2008-10-17T08:53:00.002-04:00

Just ran across this stunning piece of journalism from Sunday's Washington Times. It's a MUST-READ.

Turns out Barack Obama isn't the only Kenyan Marxist with troubling Muslim ties running for President recently - and he supported the other one.

Mr. Obama's judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was Islamic extremists in Kenya who bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 and injuring thousands. None of this has dissuaded Mr. Obama from maintaining disturbing loyalties.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

The Debate, Marxism, and the Folly of Third Party Voting (or, the Tyranny of Majoritarian Mathematics)

2008-10-16T08:16:00.006-04:00

Senator McCain was clearly more aggressively on the attack last night, but by leaving out Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he's left out one of the strongest reasons why not to vote for Barack Obama.

Bill Ayers? Unrepentant "washed up" domestic terrorist, yes, but the Weather Underground was a Marxist/left-wing organization.

ACORN? Yes, they're involved with voter registration fraud, but at their heart, they're a Marxist/left-wing organization trying to radicalize students (under the education "reform" arm) and agitate for left wing causes.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright? The context for "America's chickens have come home to roost" and "G-D America" is his Black Liberation Theology - which could just as easily be described as Urban American Marxism.

It's not that Barack Obama has individual one-time relationships with any of these people; it's that he has had fifteen-to-twenty-year relationships with all of them, concurrently. That paints a picture of a radical, Marxist leaning candidate, running for office as a Democrat.

And it's his answer to Joe the Plumber ("Spread the Wealth") that provides the meat of the charge - that Barack Obama the Marxist is a terrible choice for the country at any time, but especially in a time of economic difficulty and two wars.

Which brings me to my friends trying to get me to vote for the Constitution Party or the Libertarian Party (you know who you are).

A vote for Chuck Baldwin is a pro-choice, anti-family vote - not because Baldwin is pro-choice (he clearly isn't) but because in voting for someone with no chance of getting elected, you are allowing Barack Obama to become President - the most radically pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda candidate in our nation's history. A vote for Chuck Baldwin is a vote for Barack Obama. Please think about that before you vote. If nothing else - check out Obama's answer on Roe v. Wade last night. Roe was a constitutional disaster - and Obama thinks it was correctly decided. That alone should send shudders...

For my Libertarian friends, a vote for Bob Barr is a pro-Big Government vote - not because Barr's Big Government (he clearly isn't), but becuase in voting for someone with no chance of getting elected, you are allowing Barack Obama to become President - the most liberal, big spender in the Senate, voting against the taxpayers (either for tax increases or against tax cuts) 94 times in his short stint in the Senate. A vote for Bob Barr is a vote for Barack Obama. Please think about that before you vote.

Now, I give you these two prior paragraphs knowing that voting for a Third Party in America is an inherently irrational thing to do in a winner-take-all Electoral College sort of way. Not to get into the weeds of "rational voter theory", but as we get closer to the election, what tends to happen amongst rational voters is that they see which of the two biggest candidates can win, and choose which one they want, knowing that they want their vote to count and matter (and voting for third place usually means knowing beforehand that you aren't going to win.)

Clearly, there have been the rare exception to the rule - Independent Senators in Vermont and Connecticut come to mind. But, as a rule, and especially at the Presidential level, voting third party actually damages your cause in the long term. Rather than the two possible things you hope to do (either pull your former party in the direction you wish it was going - in this case Republicans to the right - socially or fiscally; or establish a new force in politics), what tends to happen is the opposite. By pulling your forces away from the party you used to belong to, you ensure it's electoral defeat - and get all the blame. The party in question then is free to become less like you (since you are no longer there to influence it) and your third party is also unlikely to succeed (since no new party has won a Presidential Election since Abraham Lincoln in 1860 - the first Republican President. The last President to get elected without being a Republican or a Democrat was Zachary Taylor in 1848. He was a Whig. I digress...)

My point, conservative friends, is that we have but one real, working choice to vote for President - like him or not, it's Senator John McCain.

I'm voting for McCain with my eyes open - I know the day after he gets elected that I'll be working against his policies on global warming, immigration, and probably a few other things as well. But I also know that Barack Obama is the most left-wing, Marxist major party candidate in our nation's history. And for that reason, (and for others), my car sports a McCain/Palin sticker, and I'll be voting for them.

I hope you will, too.

York County Republican Victory HQ robbed, vandalized

2008-10-11T15:52:00.004-04:00

The Republican "Victory 08" office in York County was robbed and vandalized overnight.

According to a local York County Republican volunteer, who provided us with these pictures, the vandals painted "Republican means Slavery" on the front door, as well as what appear to be gang-related or tagger signs.

The vandals also defaced large banners outside the office, painting white paint over Senator John McCain's name and eyes.

According to the volunteer, more than forty signs were also stolen from the property.

I spoke this afternoon with York County Republican Chairman (and current Republican National Committeeman) Glenn McCall, who reminds those involved that Republicans were the ones who abolished slavery.

McCall also spoke with the Rock Hill Herald:

“It just goes to show the election is much closer than folks would have you believe,” McCall said. “We have probably the most liberal ticket on the Democratic side that we’ve ever seen. When I look at the polls, it’s within the margin of error. There are people who are just getting nervous about that. As a result, they do desperate things.”

No word from local law enforcement yet as to suspects or arrests.

Stay classy, Democrats.

Debate thoughts

2008-10-08T08:42:00.005-04:00

Since Leroy apparently missed his deadline last night, I'll give you my thoughts on the Presidential debate...

Clearly, John McCain won the night, and I would expect a small bounce out of this debate, just enough to put the poll numbers in the margins. His idea to have Treasury buy up bad mortgages and renegotiate them would have cost much less than the bailout passed last week - I only wish this one had come up sooner.

But it was his attacks on the record and rhetoric of Barack Obama that defined the night, and will define this campaign in the 4 weeks ahead. McCain pounded Obama's record and his proposals, and painted the picture of a tax-and-spend liberal who will say anything to get elected while doing the opposite in power. His line of attack connecting the dots between Obama and the Freddie/Fannie mess is a powerful one, and one that let's people know Obama's culpability in the housing and financial mess. His mention of Obama's past campaign promise to cut taxes for the middle class, when he never voted for a single tax cut while in the Senate cut to Obama's credibility.

McCain did this while never mentioning the connections with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, which we now know to have been much deeper than previously reported, including $50 million in taxpayer moneys that Obama funneled to Ayers in the 1990s. McCain never mentioned the anti-American rantings of Obama cronies Rev. Jeremiah Wright or Father Michael Flegler. Clearly Obama expected those (more personal) attacks, and came out swinging - but in the wrong direction. Instead, McCain's attacks on Obama's record and his proposals left Obama on the wrong footing, answering the wrong questions while McCain connected with the audience in the room by answering their questions directly - and by extension connecting with voters across the country.

While Tom Brokaw was, in a word, awful, the town hall format still gave McCain a chance to shine, and his command of the facts (and Obama's record) gave him the clear win tonight. That should even things up with 4 weeks to go. (Note: The best moderator so far has still been Rev. Rick Warren... someone alert the MSM - they need new blood.)

Funny moment of the night: Tom Brokaw asking John McCain who his Treasury Secretary would be, and McCain answering "Not you, Tom."

Hang on, folks, it's going to be a crazy last month...

Barack Obama’s ACORN fraud

2008-10-06T12:36:00.002-04:00

Today is (mercifully) the last day to register new voters.

Which means today is the last day that ACORN and the Barack Obama campaign can fraudulently work to steal this election in the battleground states.

ACORN has been filing fraudulent voter applications in Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Ohio, and 12 other states.

Do you remember the “Barack Obama was a community organizer” attack in the Republican National Convention? ACORN is the organization for which Barack Obama was involved.

As Stanley Kurtz points out in National Review, Barack Obama served both as a corporate trainer for ACORN, and as legal counsel, even winning a case in 1995 that allowed additional voter fraud attempts by ACORN using Illinois “Motor Voter” law.

While most press accounts imply that Obama just happened to be at the sort of public-interest law firm that would take Acorn’s “motor voter” case, Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama’s representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama’s post-law school role organizing “Project VOTE” in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama’s yearly service as a key figure in Acorn’s leadership-training seminars.

At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama’s role in training Acorn’s leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama’s long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000 (Foulkes confuses the dates of these two campaigns.) With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were “old friends,” says Foulkes.

So along with the reservoir of political support that came to Obama through his close ties with Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and other Chicago black churches, Chicago Acorn appears to have played a major role in Obama’s political advance…

You begin to wonder whether, in his Springfield days, Obama might have best been characterized as “the Senator from Acorn.”

Now, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review notes that the Obama campaign has reciprocated by paying ACORN $800K in “get out the vote” and “voter registration” efforts. It is precisely these efforts (listed above) that have ended in vote fraud indictments.

When the numbers come out, we’ll see just how bad this fraud has been. Hopefully, the Obama campaign won’t be able to steal this election using ACORN as a front for vote fraud.

Best 527 ad ever?

2008-10-01T15:53:00.002-04:00

Ok all you third party groups, 527s, non-profits, and others doing ads (TV or online). Listen up.

This is how you do it. If I've seen a better ad than this one, someone needs to remind me; right now this is the best I can recall.

(and I'm an Evangelical Protestant!)

Why Abortion is a cause of the Financial Mess (by way of illegal immigration)

2008-09-29T12:24:00.003-04:00

Something struck me at breakfast this morning, an awful (and frankly, a little strange) realization that I think has been overlooked in the bailout debate.

One of the root causes of the financial mess we’re in is the holocaust of abortion.

Follow the logic here…

In the thirty five years since Roe v. Wade, 48.5 million babies have been killed (legally) in the United States. That’s 48 million people under the age of 35 that we’re missing as a nation - about 20 million of which would now be in the workforce.

In 1973, according to the US government, the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the United States was at 4 million people. In the intervening thirty-five years, those same years since Roe, that number has quintupled to (you guessed it) around 20 million. To replace the population, especially the workforce population, that had been lost by abortion, businesses turned to an underground market of illegal immigrant labor.

Where did those illegals live? Many were (and in some places, still are) in tent cities and trailer parks hidden away around the nation.

But, in the 1990s, something strange happened. In the ‘90s, those who wanted low-income folks (many of whom had been the victims of racial discrimination) to get more affordable housing changed the rules for lending to those folks, but did it in a way that included easing the paperwork burden. This noble goal came with an unintended consequence: illegal immigrants flocked to buy houses, since the new rules made it easier to get mortgages without actually being a citizen or legal resident.

Those same rule changes allowed no down payment mortgages up to 125% of the value of the house – which encouraged fraud among the illegal immigrant population.

Imagine the fraud possibility – you use the fraudulent documents that allowed you to steal someone else’s identity to also get a mortgage, for 125% of the value of a home, pocket the extra 25% in cash, live in the house for a year, don’t make payments, leave to go work somewhere else and let the bank foreclose. And because you’re on a stolen identity, no one can track you down.

Now, I do understand that this is only one part of the overall mess in the financial system, and not a comprehensive fix. But it’s still a major part.

The Bailout Package really should include border fencing and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Otherwise, we’re open for more of this in the future.

Update: Video of liberal Democrats in denial over the impact of Fannie and Freddie. When you watch press coverage tonight of the bailout, remember that those same folks are the ones who gave us this mess in the first place.

Presidential Debate thoughts

2008-09-27T09:08:00.003-04:00

McCain on points... no Knockout blows in Round 1.

If you want to know how I spent my evening, The State has the roundup. Don't miss the video...

How far to the right did Barack Obama shift before last night's debate? All of a sudden, he's trying to sound like a neocon - giving Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership, calling Iran a terror sponsor, and calling Israel our staunchest ally. If he had come out like that in the Dem debates, we would've been watching someone else on stage last night. All part of the show, I suppose...

McCain did a better job of defining his opponent than Obama did last night. Obama tried to make this the "Bush/McCain" term, and did OK doing it. McCain solidly (and repeatedly) made the point that Obama is too dangerously naive to be President.

There was one clear loser in this debate: Jim Lehrer. I kept expecting him to handout boxing gloves or brass knuckles while trying to get the two to attack each other. After last night, I wouldn't be surprised if PBS got it's federal funding eliminated to help pay for the bailout package...

Every debate moderator has to live up to the memory of Tim Russert (and the surprisingly solid forum performance of Pastor Rick Warren). Lehrer fell far short of those considerations last night.

Where the financial mess goes from here: my 3-point plan

2008-09-23T17:17:00.004-04:00

OK, so, for the purposes of this discussion, let's assume the bailout passes, in some form. Congratulations, taxpayers, you're the proud new owners of approximately $700B in other people's bad debts. (I won't get into those arguments here, but I think Senator Jim Demint and former Speaker Newt Gingrich have already made the best cases against the bailout...)

All that said, let's assume for the moment that, 70% of the American public's lack of support notwithstanding, the bailout passes Congress this week, in some form or fashion. Where should we go from there? Here's my three point plan...

The Federal Government must get out of the federal housing and mortgage business, phased out over the next ten to twenty years.

This entire mess happened when President Clinton bowed to liberal pressure (or helped engineer it) and pushed through initiatives to expand home ownership. A laudable goal, to be sure, but never underestimate the power of unintended consequences when dealing with the behomoth that is the Federal Government. The government's interference into the marketplace, loosening credit to folks who frankly never should have gotten loans in the name of expanded home ownership and a growing economy, blew up in all of our faces this month. Fannie is a New Deal relic whose expiration time has come due.

So, just as soon as the Treasury Secretary gets his grubby mitts on those debts and the public panic calms down, the US government needs to get out of the mortgage business altogether. Take a couple of years, five at the most to quietly and slowly sell off all of the assets we're taking control of now. Then take a couple of years to sell off all of the Fannie and Freddie assets and close them down. The experiment into government-based lending needs to stop - the government is great at taking people's money, but a rank amateur at managing the process. (Oh, and Rep. Barney Frank should not be allowed within one hundred nautical miles of this process. He's as much responsible for this mess as anyone.)

While we're at it, after we've closed Freddie and Fannie, the whole federal housing mess needs to go away as well. No more crime-stricken, drug-ridden housing projects, no more foot-bridges to nowhere for local congresscritters, no more corrupt under the table favors for which landowner gets to sell out to the feds at an overinflated price. As with so many other things, this is just something the federal government has no business dealing in, no matter how noble the goal. The sooner we get out of this mess, the faster it can get cleaned up - though I'd take ten years to phase the program out altogether, just to make the landing as soft as possible for the folks ekeing out a living in those homes now.

No "Government sponsored entity" should be allowed to donate money to political campaigns. Ever.

The Obama folks will quite rightly point to the $180K that has been donated from Freddie and Fannie to the McCain camp, who will quickly and even more rightly retort that Senator Obama has taken more money in less time ($500K in only two and a half years in the Senate) than any other member of either house of Congress. They're both right, and they're both wrong. I know how much campaigns cost, I don't begrudge politicians' ability to raise money, and I'm willing to give them both a pass on this one, because they accepted legal political contributions.

(Political integrity should mean you accept all legal donations, and still work for what's best for the American citizenry. If you can't work for the citizens because you've taken a political donation, you're in the wrong business. But I digress...)

But that doesn't excuse the fact that Freddie and Fannie have been spreading the federal largesse to the political campaigns of more than three hundred members of Congress. That's unacceptable - federal government entities should not be allowed to influence the campaigns of those whose oversight impacts their business (which should've been closed down years ago...see above.) Frankly, the Hatch Act should've covered this, but since they made Freddie and Fannie "Government Sponsored Entities" (GSEs) instead of departments of the government, the employees weren't covered, and neither were the companies. That should stop - and these companies (and any quasi-governmental or GSE entities like them) shouldn't be allowed PACs, either.

While we're at it, this goes at the state level too - states shouldn't be lobbying the feds for funding, and neither should cities and counties be hiring lobbyists to go for state money, while state associations give money to State Senators, Reps and Leadership PACs. That's just Big Government Corruption begetting more Big Government Corruption, as far as I'm concerned.

On to the Wall Street side of the mess...

No More Short Selling, Naked or Otherwise.

For the uninitiated, the process of short selling involves selling a stock you don't own shares of, and then making up for it later by buying the shares at a lower price. This isn't responsible or moral investing, it's a casino game for vultures - and it directly contributed to the downfalls of Lehman and AIG last week. Senator McCain has quite rightly criticized the SEC for allowing short-selling to continue, and for now, the SEC is banning it - for financials. I'd like to see that go across the board and permanently.

(The difference between "Short Selling" and "Naked Short Selling" is whether or not you borrow someone else's shares first before you sell them. I'm largely referring to Naked, or unborrowed, Short Selling, but the problems apply to both types.)

This isn't the first time this battle's been waged either. In addition to being banned in England after a Dutch tulip crisis, short-selling was partly blamed for the crash of 1929 that brought about (or at least exacerbated) the Great Depression. It's also partly to blame (along with Bernie Ebbers' $11B fraud) for the collapse (and subsequent bankruptcy) of WorldCom, my former employer. After the near-death experience the market had last week, it's long since time to say "Real Men Don't Sell Short."

So, that's my three point plan. Comment away.

ICYMI: Kevin Hassett on How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

2008-09-22T16:15:00.002-04:00

Courtesy Bloomberg News - this is important reading to understand why liberally motivated government intervention brought us the financial crisis we're in now.

(In other words, this is why excessive government intervention is to blame, and not the free market.)

The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@aei.org

Obama Goes to Hollywood

2008-09-17T08:43:00.004-04:00

So the headlines have been blaring about a $28,500/plate fundraising dinner for Barack Obama last night, one attended by about 300 people (the usual Hollyweird crowd - Will Ferrell, Jodie Foster, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Lee Curtis, Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg...). Barbara Streisand was there singing, so I have to admit, I'm glad I wasn't there.

But it raises a question. I am NOT an expert on presidential fundraising or the laws that govern it (I'm a policy/communications guy...important to "know thyself"), but if memory serves, the legal presidential contribution limit is $2300 per person, no corporate contributions allowed, and all of those people must be US citizens or legal residents, who in turn must also report home address, employer and occupation, etc.

So, if the legal limit is $2300, how do you even legally schedule a $28,500/plate dinner, and have the headline "Obama raises $9M at Hollywood fundraiser"? Isn't the most Obama could raise from 300 people $690K? (I'm a policy guy 'cuz I'm good with the math...) That sounds like more than twelve times the legal limit to me... or is there some weird loophole that lets celebrities give more than normal people?

(Paging Sunny Philips - your expertise is needed today... and we miss your blog)

These have been held previously - most notably one for Hillary in 2005. That one ended badly, with one of the fundraisers getting in federal trouble for breaking campaign finance laws, but for reporting misdeeds, not the clearly obvious "over the limit" thing (The the NY Times has a page up from 2007 that alleges a series of Clinton fundraising abuses.)

Interesting note - McCain, whose monstrous campaign finance law at the least complicates this issue, dinged Obama about the fundraiser with "celebrity friends" but not about the dollar amount.

So why is it legal to hold events that cost 12 times the legal contribution limit to get in? Anyone?

on Patriotism, and Blogging 9/11

2008-09-11T09:25:00.007-04:00

OK, I'm opening a can of worms here, but I think it has to be said...

Patriots, blogging on 9/11/01 today:

Adam Fogle, whose Palmetto Scoop included the patriot poetry of a dying Jack Buck;

Earl Capps, who posts Lincoln's Gettysburg Address;

Dan Cassidy, whose Sunlit Uplands posted numerous items, including this patriotic YouTube;

Brian McCarty, whose VUI posted a composite picture of the victims;

Mike's America, who posts pictures and video from the day;

Jeff Duncan, whose Walk-On Legislator posts thoughts from an airport this morning;

Rod Shealy, Sr, recovering from brain tumor surgery, takes a moment to remember 9/11;

Michelle Malkin remembers, while Hugh Hewitt Prays;

The Jawas remember, and do not forgive;

Don McLaughlin remembers where he was at on 9-11 on Redstate;

****

And then we have our friends on the left...

The ever aptly titled notverybright chose to attack The State's Brad Warthen for his support of the Iraq War today, before a post questioning Sarah Palin's qualifications;

Tammy at Seeding Spartanburg chose to mock Sarah Palin's last name today;

Tim Kelly at Crack the Bell chose to continue his attacks on Sarah Palin today (one day after changing "Shrill b*tch" to "lying sack of s**t")

Waldo Lydecker chose to attack Sarah Palin's Christian Faith today.

****

It's not that I'm questioning the patriotism of you liberal bloggers; it's that you don't apparently have any patriotism for me to question. You're too busy attacking the Republican Vice Presidential nominee...

****

An important exception: Roxanne Walker did something different - she chose to pay tribute to Iraqi veterans who suffer from depression and mental illness as a result of the war. While I don't agree with her conclusions (or even her premise), I still appreciate that she took the time to pay tribute to one American soldier today.

****

For some actually historic perspective on 9/11, check out the History Channel's 102 Minutes that changed America. I highly recommend the site - especially for those of you mentioned above who have apparently forgotten that day, what happened, how we changed, and why.

Reprise: The Ballad of Johnny Heff

2008-09-11T09:14:00.003-04:00

As we remember 9/11/2001 today, I am reprising my Project 2,996 posting from two years ago, memorializing one of the heroes who fell that awful day, seven years ago.

May we never forget.

*****

Johnny Heffernan was a guitar player, and reportedly a very good one. He played first for a band called the Psychotics, then for a New York neo-punk band known as the Bullys, wearing his trademark black t-shirt and jeans, and working with Marky Ramone on their first album: Stomposition. According to John Holmstrom, editor of Punk Magazine, The Bullys were a force in renewing the punk scene in New York, and Johnny was the true force behind the band.

If not for The Bullys, I might never have bothered with the relaunch of PUNK magazine. This band, more than anything else, convinced me that there's a real rock 'n' roll scene out there worth writing about. I wanted to bring out a new PUNK magazine so maybe we could put The Bullys on the map, just like we did for The Ramones, Blondie and the Dead Boys back in the day… Johnny had real star quality. He was good-looking, articulate (in his own way), talented, ambitious, and charismatic… I thought he was like the Jimmy Cagney of punk rock.

Johnny Heff was as rebellious as you would expect from a punk rocker, except that the occasional target of his anger was radical Islam. And sometimes, that came out in lyrical form:

"I hear the government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. Where da f*** is Gasghanistan? I gotta get a f***in' map for dat one. Anyway, it must be one tough m*****f***ing country to wage war against chicks, huh? Since some dude named The Taliban took power in 1996, women had to wear some s*** called the Bercha or somethin', and have been beaten and stoned in public for not wearin' the proper attire. So I guess tattoos and leather pants are out of the question, eh? ... Well, if they ever get into a war with the United States, they should know we ain't gonna just send a bunch of chicks to f*** 'em up... I'll go to fight... Anybody know where 'dis backward frickin' place is?"

Liberal Hate (or Why They're Screaming Scared of Sarah Palin)

2008-09-09T09:00:00.006-04:00

I've long noted that the "Hate is not a Family Value" bumpersticker crowd loves to hate the conservatives they accuse of being hateful. This is wedded to the liberal interest group notion that people in certain groups should "belong" to the Democrats, and if they don't the need to be punished for getting out of line. The two groups that drive liberal Democrats craziest are conservative women and conservative minorities.

For past national examples of this, I would point to the vicious left-wing attacks on Michael Steele (the infamous blackface Photoshop), Clarence Thomas, and Michele Malkin. For past SC examples look no further than Karen Floyd's face with the words "Cocaine Fueled" superimposed, or Ross Shealy's now infamous attack in The State on Karen Iacovelli's Lyme Disease (the one I responded to by referring to him as “morally reprehensible and well beyond the bounds of acceptable civil discourse” - the tagline he still proudly displays on his other blog).

Well, they're at it again over Alaska Governor (and McCain running mate) Sarah Palin. Bob McAlister has already given you his take on the media's spurious attacks, but I thought I'd hit it from another angle - the liberal hate-osphere.

After Republicans noted the lack of experience at the head of the Democrat ticket, Donna Brazile on CNN's Strategy Room compared Obama to Christ and Palin to Pilate: "Jesus was a community organizer; Pontius Pilate was a governor."

Juan Cole in Salon today compared Governor Palin to "a Muslim Fundamentalist with lipstick."

SC's own Waldo Lydecker calls Palin "James Dobson's Moose Muppet" and a "trailer-trash Christianista".

Elonkey rolls out the snark to call her "one of those perky little ex-beauty queens who will repeatedly stab you with her rhetoric while wearing a 1,000-watt smile on her face". In the same snarky vein, Deacon Tim refers to her "truthiness."

Tim at Crack the Bell just comes out and calls her a "Shrill Bitch."

Hey liberals: y'all stay classy, now...

*****

Pat Buchanon points out this morning:

Palin's daughter was fair game for a media that refused to look into reports that John Edwards, a Democratic candidate for president, was conducting an illicit affair with a woman said to be carrying his child and cheating on his faithful wife Elizabeth, who has incurable cancer. That was not a legitimate story, but Bristol Palin's pregnancy is?

Mona Charen adds:

Sarah Palin is no ordinary pro-lifer. She is an attractive, intelligent, ambitious, successful woman who has actually lived her convictions... And there stands Sarah, Trig Palin in her arms, a beautiful ambassador for the path of humility, duty, honor, and grace. It's no wonder she was in their crosshairs from the get go.

Final Thoughts from Convention Week

2008-09-06T12:14:00.002-04:00

I thought I'd give you a wrap up of the week with my own thoughts and recollections.

Governor Sarah Palin is the Real Deal.
It was a privilege to meet her, and her husband, and her mother, and her aunts. Folks, these are real, every day, down to earth people. No putting on airs, no falsity, just real people - and frankly a breath of fresh air.

Politically, that is going to connect with most of the heartland of this country. The northeastern liberal elites, especially in the media, will never understand the Palins, and will never understand why they connect at such a deep level with ordinary Americans. Neither will the West Coast Hollywood crowd. But the vast middle of the country, stretching from the Sierras to the edges of the Beltway, will understand this family perfectly - because we and they are the same. These are normal people with normal struggles and triumphs and challenges. That is why the left and the media have gone bonkers trying to cut her to ribbons - they understand the danger Governor Palin brings without understanding her at all.

Her speech was simply brilliant - even more so because the teleprompter had died a third of the way through. When they checked the tape to the original, she had changed one only word (not counting the insertion of the now famous pit bull/hockey mom/lipstick reference). That is a sign of a great and polished speaker who kept her head remarkably well.

But her speech, while fantastic, wasn't the memory I will cherish the most from this convention. Later that night, after we rode the bus back to the hotel, but before we went to the party up the street, a number of us were in the hotel lobby/lounge area. In walks Henry Kissinger. I get to meet Henry Kissinger and shake his hand - too weird. I'm still in that lobby (after taking a few pictures) when I hear the elevator ding - and in walks Sarah and Todd Palin. They meet a few people and chat, and pose for pictures, before the Secret Service politely reminds her to keep moving, and she does - into the hotel lounge/restaurant area.

The roar that went up from the folks in the hotel lounge is a sound I will remember for the rest of my life. It sounded like a Stanley Cup winning goal had been scored, or a Super Bowl winning touchdown - in overtime. The hotel shook with the noise - and then they all started chanting "SARAH... SARAH..." I get choked up just remembering that sound. I spoke with someone Friday morning who still had chills just thinking about it - she was on the third floor and on the other end of the hotel, and she still heard it (and wondered why she wasn't downstairs in the lounge...)

One last thought on Sarah Palin - sometime Wednesday night, around 11PM EDT, the Presidential hopes of Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and anyone else whose name was on this year's ballot - their future White House hopes died that night. Anyone on this year's ballot had only this year to pull the trick - and that moment has now passed. The entrance of Sarah Palin onto the national stage heralds the end of one generation of Republican politician and the beginning of the next. This new breed is conservative socially and fiscally, but is reform minded - something the Big Government breed of Republicans just can't get. The corruption, scandal, and failure of Tom Delay, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Duke Cunningham and the K Street cabal has led inexorably to a generation of leaders like Governors Palin, Jindal and Sanford (and probably others we don't even know yet) who will lead this party into the future. I welcome this development wholeheartedly, even as I remain concerned with some of Senator McCain's own proclivities on border security and global warming...

Other highlights of this week: Wednesday night's speech lineup was rock star - and they all hit it out of the park. Huckabee, Romney, Giuliani - all did fantastic jobs at warming things up. That more people watched Wednesday night than watched Obama's speech augurs well for the Republicans this fall.

Lowlights of the week - protestor idiots, especially the ones that MSNBC allowed to get access into the arena on Thursday night. Shame on MSNBC for knowingly giving protestors badges so they could make trouble - someone needs to get fired for that, just as someone needs to get prosecuted for stealing the identity of an Indiana delegate to gain unlawful access.

People I got to meet (and really enjoyed): The Palins, Mayor Giuliani, Jon Voight, Mary Katherine Ham, Henry Kissinger, and the guy who played George Washington.

SC people (some delegates) I had the pleasure of hanging out with this week: Lou and Patrick Nolan, Doug and LouEllen Robertson, Gen. Richard and Linnea Eckstrom, Kevin Hall, Jim Corbett, Reps. Alan Clemmons, Tracy Edge, Eric Bedingfield, and Wendy Nanney (along with her husband Tim), Glenn McCall, Moye Graham (who is a prince), Eaddy Roe Willard, Katrina Shealy, and Drew McKissick. Special Thanks also to the folks who did videos this week: Lt. Gov Bauer, Atty Gen. McMaster, Speaker Harrell, Congressmen Wilson and Inglis, Rep. Bedingfield, and Kevin Hall. I do wish Governor Sanford could've stayed longer (we had to cancel the scheduled video due to Hanna's arrival) and that Rep. Gresham Barrett could've come up (something happened there and that video didn't happen either).

It was a pleasure and a privilege to go to this convention with such a fine delegation - even more so under the leadership of our Chairman, Katon Dawson, who did remarkable work this week. Jay W., Katie, Lisa, and Rob also were terrific, and did a ton of work keeping things running. Well done all.

So now it's back to work. I'm back in Lexington, dodging the hurricane on the drive down from Charlotte airport last night. After this many nights of too little sleep, I think it's nap time...

SC Delegate reactions from the RNC

2008-09-06T12:13:00.002-04:00

Two reaction videos for you, from the Hilton Minneapolis - Kevin Hall of Richland County and Rep. Eric Bedingfield of Greenville. These are two of the wonderful people I've had the pleasure and privilege of hanging out with this week.

First Kevin:

And Eric:

Andre Bauer at the RNC

2008-09-05T14:44:00.002-04:00

SC Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer talks with us before the SC delegation breakfast on September 4, 2008

Glenn McCall at the RNC

2008-09-05T14:41:00.002-04:00

Glenn McCall, Republican National COmmitteeman joins us at the Republican National Convention. Day 4 after breakfast.

SC Attorney General Henry McMaster at the RNC

2008-09-05T14:37:00.001-04:00

From the Morning of Day 4 at the RNC: SC Attorney General Henry McMaster

And now for something completely different...

2008-09-04T16:19:00.005-04:00

I thought I'd also show some of the fun side of Minneapolis. The Civic Fest has been running since Sunday, and Sunday night, we started with the Host Committee Reception there.

So... here's some video of what that looked like this afternoon...

Unfortunately, I missed getting pictures of Abraham Lincoln.

More photos from some of my fellow delegates to come, including the frankly surreal moment where some of us got to meet Dr. Henry Kissinger, while others met Todd and Sarah Palin...

AND - I'm on the floor tonight!!

RNC Day 4 breakfast

2008-09-04T16:14:00.003-04:00

After a really stirring night last night where Sarah Palin hit a grand slam with her speech, we got together for one last delegation breakfast.

Our Intro speaker was Senator Lindsey Graham, who also spoke later in prime time.

That was followed up by one the young bright lights of American conservatism - Michael Steele of GOPAC. Video in two parts below.

Part I:

Part II:

Thoughts from the 50th, Part II: Jim Demint

2008-09-04T08:38:00.002-04:00

After we heard at length from T. Boone Pickens, we got to hear from our Senator, Jim Demint. Jim spoke on the challenges that face our party, including the energy challenge that T.Boone had just laid out...

Part I:

Part II:

Congressman Joe Wilson at the RNC

2008-09-04T08:31:00.001-04:00

Before he flew back to SC for hurricane duty, Joe Wilson had a chat with one of his constituents - me!

Congressman Bob Inglis at the RNC

2008-09-04T02:46:00.001-04:00

Next up: Congressman Bob Inglis, from the RNC

Bobby Harrell at the RNC

2008-09-04T02:44:00.001-04:00

First in a series of interviews with SC Republican newsmakers at the convention: SC Speaker Bobby Harrell

Thoughts from the 50th Floor: Breakfast at the RNC

2008-09-03T11:46:00.003-04:00

So breakfast this morning was on the 50th Floor of the IDS building in downtown Minneapolis: "Windows on Minnesota". This is the view out one of those windows, an iconic downtown Minneapolis office building on the right and the Mississippi River flowing on the left.

As we walked out of the hotel this morning on our way to Windows, we were immediately hit with the after-effects of Labor Day - Fall has fallen on Minnesota. The brisk breeze this morning was an amazing refreshment after months of heat and humidity, and served to wake us all up in a hurry, despite the early hour. (I was up working on the blog and still unresolved video issues from yesterday until about 2AM... 0730 meeting in the lobby came awfully early today.)

Our speaker this morning was also well worth the wait - one of America's finest entrepreneurs, T. Boone Pickens. Mr. Pickens is out working on promoting his energy program, which largely consists of expanding our domestic energy production, especially revitalizing our transportation infrastructure with natural gas and our home energy needs with wind, solar, and nuclear. The environmental impacts of this would be remarkable, but the key point, as you will see below, is removing America's dependence on foreign sources of oil. I suggest watching all five in order - this was pretty much the full speech, divided up this way so I could load on YT.

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Conclusion:

Republican National Convention Day 2

2008-09-02T15:26:00.006-04:00

VERY Busy day today - sorry for how late this is getting posted! With the convention in full gear, we didn't have many moments to spare...

We opened up with another delegation breakfast, this one a joint deal with New Hampshire. It was an opportunity for the McCain campaign to thank the two states that gave him early primary victories.

We heard from the Secretary of Commerce, then a former POW who had been in the Hanoi Hilton with Senator McCain.

After remarks from Senator Lindsey Graham, Cindy McCain addressed the breakfast, as well as America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Unfortunately the video files are getting fought by YouTube and Blip... hopefully I'll have those up soon.

After getting some of our marching orders for the day, a few of us headed over to a surprising symposium on education involving Speaker Newt Gingrich, MN Governor Tim Pawlenty, and ... the Rev. Al Sharpton! Yes, a Republican audience gave Al Sharpton two standing ovations! Shocking stuff, I tell ya... The crux of the argument is choosing children over bureaucrats - including merit pay for teachers and more market based reforms (school choice, anyone?) American Solutions has more information and the video here.

Then it was off to lunch with the delegation - and two very special guests, the Ambassadors from India and New Zealand. Congressman Joe Wilson made some remarks on the importance of US-India relations, and emphasized the SC ties with India. And the food was awesome...

Then we headed over to another restaurant in town (the restaurant row in downtown Minneapolis is called Nicolette Mall -- and it's truly impressive...) for a reception honoring Senate Conservatives, especially Senator Jim Demint. It was great to see the Senator there as well as Governor Sanford. Because of scheduling, this was just a quick drop by before we boarded buses to cross the Mighty Mississippi for St. Paul.

As for the first full night... the video clips were amazing, especially the ones narrated by Robert Duvall and Gary Sinise.

I got to the floor for Fred's speech... and loved every minute of it. Fred was as good as I've seen him all year, perhaps more comfortable singing the praises of others than he was himself during the campaign.

Then it was off to Senator Demint's birthday party...

More to come tomorrow.

Convention Day 1: George Washington gets us kicked off

2008-09-01T11:25:00.002-04:00

South Carolina's delegation breakfast got off to a rousing start today with the actor who played George Washington in the History Channels "The Revolution". After giving us some historical perspective on the importance of prayer, General Washington led us in a prayer of his own (taken from his diary.)

After that, we got our marching orders for the day (get your badges, make the bus, don't forget the milk and cookies party...) and an update on the electoral landscape from Whit Ayres (who agrees with the importance of the Palin pick.)

Mostly just business today while we watch. Everyone is palpably relieved that Gustav seems to have spared New Orleans. At the same time, Don Fowler has clearly put his foot in it with his over the top rhetoric about God sending hurricanes to stop the convention. Favorite unintentional admission of the morning: Howard Wolfson on Fox News "Sometimes we say things we don't mean." Yep - that's one of the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats often say things they don't mean - thanks for admitting it.

The energy surrounding this campaign is overwhelmingly positive since the announcement of Sarah Palin as the running mate. The base is energized and motivated in a way we weren't just a week ago. The polling from Rasmussen and Zogby shows McCain/Palin leading (in basically a statistical tie) with Obama/Biden, and that's after their convention and before ours - unheard of. As long as we can get in three solid days of message (Tuesday through Thursday after the cancellation of political speeches tonight due to Gustav) we should see a modest bounce on top of that, and go into the final two month stretch with a lead...

Convention Arrival

2008-08-31T11:08:00.004-04:00

I pulled in around 9:00 PM local time last night, weary from too much flying (I still don’t know if it was Northwest or Priceline that bumped my two-hour direct flight from Charlotte to MSP into two separate two hour flights, with Memphis in the middle… I suspect the airline… and I digress.)

The trip up was eventful. The drive up I-77 to Charlotte included some guy in a minivan who rode my bumper for an hour (even when I changed lanes…). You know that section where 77 goes from two to three to four lanes? I stayed in the “fast” lane, which became the “2” lane. The minivan goes flying around me, but fails to notice the real reason I was driving 70 – the unmarked officer car in front of me, who promptly nails the minivan for whatever speed he was doing when he blew by Sparky. Sometimes, karma’s a beaut.

My first flight was with an LAPD officer who just got back from Iraq this week. Definitely an eye-opener on what’s going on there. It’s clear we’ve won what we went to do – so it’s fast approaching time to declare victory, turn it over to the Iraqis and bring the boys home. Victory with honor is a great way to wrap it all up…

My second flight was also interesting. I was next to two older gals from Mississippi. One was from the north part of the state and was headed to a Montana retreat with her family for two weeks. The place sounds idyllic – a ranch with a stream in the mountains… The other gal was from Pass Christiane, and was fleeing Gustav in advance. When she had returned to her home after Katrina, EVERYTHING had been gone, including the foundation, and two of her best friends. This time, she and her husband didn’t pack the blueprints for the house – if this hurricane takes the newly rebuilt home, they’ll go somewhere else.

These two gals are part of a very important sector of the Republican coalition – married women (who, the polling tells us, are twice as likely to vote Republican as are single women.) Suffice it to say they both had similar feelings as I have had in this election season. None of us were all that thrilled with the concept of a McCain candidacy, but we’re all absolutely stoked over a McCain/Palin candidacy. Two days on, among the folks who are the backbone of the Party, the Palin choice is an absolute home run – exactly what was needed to reach out to the Republican base and energize it. McCain is his own best outreach to the middle (though Palin’s reach to independent women and the “hockey moms” of the battleground states of the northern Midwest {MN, MI, WI, IA, OH, and PA} will be critical).

After so much flying (and a long wait for the luggage at MSP) it was a relief to get to the hotel and immediately be among so many friends. I’ve already run into at least a dozen SC folks, including Chairman Dawson this morning. It’s kinda weird to travel all day, and then see friendly faces you know when you get here. I’ve also run into a fellow traveler from the Fred Thompson campaign as well as Bud McFarlane, the former Reagan National Security Advisor who is now a delegate from DC.

Dawn broke this morning to a brilliant blue sky day here – a cool breeze blowing through the sun-splashed city. I walked the two blocks down to Key’s Café, which came highly recommended by security here. (Travelers hint – if you want to know where to go to get a real breakfast, ask security. They know. Trust me.) The “Everything” omelette was as good as promised, including the homemade strawberry jam on the 12-grain wheat toast. The ambiance was somewhat disturbed when we were joined by the members of a lesbian protestor choir who saw our badges and simply glared…

OH yes, I nearly forgot – the “protestors”. A handful of “peaceful protestors” were arrested yesterday by local law enforcement (God Bless Them All), and charged with conspiracy to start a riot. Among the items confiscated were knives, machetes, slingshots, bows, arrows, lighter fluid, and (my personal favorite) “buckets of urine.” I’m guessing they wanted to mark their territory before they shot the flaming arrows of Gladiator doom in our direction. Good on the local sheriff for shutting it down.

St. Paul city Councilman Dave Thune gets the prize for clueless local Democrat politician quote of the day: (amalgamated from MSNBC and the STrib)

"This is not the way to start things off," Thune said Saturday morning. "This is sending the wrong message. Regardless of how you feel about these people...they had a right to be there… We spent so much time trying to welcome people to the city and now this is the way we start out," he said. "It pretty much sucks."

Gee, Councilman Thune, “We invited folks to be here” is an awfully strange excuse for why those folks should be met with weaponry upon arrival…or did you mean you’ve been inviting anarchist rioters to your district, while the rest of the city is trying welcome Republicans here for a convention? (So… yes, I am wearing my convention security badge for the next week…)

Actually, the local folks working the convention have been spectacularly welcoming. Special shout-out to Annie and Lorri from the MSP2008 crew who have been invaluable in dispensing tourism advice and maps... even last night's cab driver was into the convention spirit, as an immigrant who came here legally to start a new business and enjoy the American dream as “his own boss.”

Bad Republican rumor of the day – if and when Gustav hits we may shut down the convention. That would be a mistake. This is an opportunity for Senator McCain and Governor Palin to be serious about serious issues at the convention – even if by satellite live from the Gulf Coast. We delegates can be responsible and dial down the “party” aspect of a convention like this – but we shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to energize the base (here and around the country). The Palin nomination has us all in high-energy mode right now, and this convention could be a terrific way to channel that energy into community service projects (locally and in the Gulf) that could go a long way towards building our reputation along those lines. All that said, our prayers go out to the folks along the Gulf Coast right now in the path of the storm. They’re very much in our thoughts.

I’m one of at least three of us blogging from the SC delegation – along with my convention roomie Drew McKissick (Conservative Outpost), and Rep. Alan Clemmons, who is writing for the Sun News. I’m looking forward to what the next week holds.

OK, Moye Graham just rolled up - time for the Party to start...

BREAKING: McCain/Palin

2008-08-29T10:40:00.001-04:00

Terrific news out of Dayton, Ohio this morning – Fox News is confirming that Senator McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate!

Governor Palin:

• Has more Executive experience than either of the Democrats on their team (and more than McCain for that matter);
• is staunchly pro-life, with a compelling life story to tell, and impeccable pro-Second Amendment credentials, cementing the Republican base;
• is the perfect foil against “Beltway” Biden;
• is the younger looking person we needed to offset McCain’s age;
• is a self-proclaimed “hockey mom” (of 5 kids) who will play well in the battleground states of the upper Midwest;
• is the perfect response to Obama’s inability or unwillingness to choose Hillary Clinton – and the perfect way to reach out to women swing voters;
• has a great reputation as a reformer – someone who has cleaned up corruption and stands up against the lobbyist corruption; and
• has a tremendous grasp of the energy issue as it relates to oil and gasoline (the one Obama stupidly pooh-poohed last night during his speech).

My Grade: A. She’s a slight touch soft on the global warming issue for me, but other than that, she’s an absolutely dynamite pick.

This is the pick I had hoped for, and it cements my vote for McCain/Palin in the fall. I had been holding out to commit, waiting for this pick to make my own decision, and hoping he would pick a pro-lifer. After his stellar performance at Saddleback, and with this great pick, now I can proudly say – Vote McCain/Palin!

Next week is going to be a lot of fun – and I’ll be there, laptop in hand, to post a few blogs along the way. I’ll have a cam with me, so hopefully we can get some good video as well!

Best Olympic Commercials: Nike

2008-08-27T08:45:00.003-04:00

The first features USA Basketball to the sounds of Marvin Gaye. (or as my sister referred to it "The Most Fly National Anthem Ever."

The second ad is just a celebration of sport (utilizing Nike athletes, to be sure) but it's a visual stunner...

The Games of the XXIX Olympiad

2008-08-24T14:11:00.004-04:00

As the glow of the Olympic flame dies away, here are the thoughts from a 16 day Couch Potato…

The Highs:

Michael Phelps, Most Decorated Olympian Ever

His 8 gold medals in Beijing give Phelps a whopping 14 career golds (to go with the two other bronzes he received in Athens) while passing Mark Spitz’s record for gold medals in one Games. Many of the performances were dominating, two were squeaked out by a fingernail (including that unbelievable finish in the 100 Fly). But any way you cut it, the performance by Phelps was the headline of these Games, one for the history books. It’s also one for Frosted Flakes, which will be featuring Phelps on its boxes after the latest endorsement deal was struck.

Brian Clay Wins the Decathlon

An American winning the title “World’s Greatest Athlete”? Awesome. Clay did it in style, winning 7 of the ten events outright. Notable: Clay’s coach at Azusa Pacific was former US Olympian Dan O’Brien, who you may remember from the 1992 “Dan and Dave” Reebok ad campaign.

USA Volleyball Dominates – Indoor and on the Beach, and in Prime Time

In the not-so-long history of Olympic Beach Volleyball, no nation had ever taken the gold in the men’s and women’s events – until the US did it this year with the double duos of Misty May and Kerri Walsh along with “Professor” Rogers and “Thin Beast” Dalhausser. Walsh and Dalhausser were especially dominant at the net. May and Walsh provided one of the indelible images of the Athens Games four years ago, and their celebration was notable again this year, mostly for their irrepressible joy on the court.

Indoors, the US Women were led to the silver medal by outside hitter Logan Tom, whose booming spikes from all over the floor proved too much for the rest of the field to compete with.

But the US Men became one of the feel good stories of the Olympics. Coach Hugh McCutcheon’s father-in-law was tragically murdered in Beijing, and his mother-in-law was also stabbed and critically injured. The Men’s team rallied around their coach, pushing their way into a gold medal win over Brazil.

USA Gymnastics Women Weather Controversy, Bring Home Gold

Nastia Liukin (more on her shortly) wins the all-around gold over Shawn Johnson, while Johnson takes home the gold in the Balance Beam. They combine for a team silver as well (for now - more on that later). Liukin’s grace and Russian-style elegance contrasts with Johnson’s power and athletic execution – yet both are uniquely American, and both very successful. Watch for Johnson to return as the overall favorite in London in four years.

USA Womens Soccer Loses Star, Wins Gold

Despite the loss of superstar striker Abby Wambach in the last pre-Olympic warmup game (the Brazilians broke her leg - not kidding…), and losing its opening match with Norway, the US rallied behind stellar goalkeeping by Hope Solo and a well rounded attack to take the Gold in an overtime final match against Brazil (ironically enough). Best Medal Ceremony of the Games: All of the US Women singing along with the National Anthem.

China Produces Most Beautiful Opening Ceremonies Ever

OK, so with a reported budget of $300M, this wasn’t the highest hurdle to cross. Still, the Opening Ceremonies were truly memorable, a blend of Chinese philosophy, art, and culture (without the ugly Communist brown and grey). It was the largest LED screen ever, the largest fireworks display ever, and the largest cultural display – all at once. Fitting ceremony from the world’s largest populace, though not without controversy (more later).

The Forgotten Olympic Swimming Champion? Natalie Coughlin wins 6 medals

Coughlin takes home the gold in the 100 Back, plus two silvers and three bronzes, bringing her remarkable career total to 11 Olympic medals. I guess that was too few to get the press’ attention compared to Phelps, but Coughlin’s accomplishment is still extraordinary, and she wears it well.

The American Dream is Alive and Well

Nastia Liukin’s father? A Russian immigrant who won gold in Seoul, then came to America for a better life. Shawn Johnson’s Coach? A Chinese gymnast who came to America for a better life. USA Wrestler Henry Cejudo? Son of a single mom who was once an illegal immigrant. Cejudo’s father died in prison last year. Cejudo used his wrestling to get out of South Central LA and start a better life – and now he’s the “future of USA Wrestling.” Awesome.

The Redeem Team saves USA Basketball

Remember all of the bad buzz around the last Dream Team? Celebrity behavior, non-team gangsters out for personal glory, and no gold medal? (I have to admit – I haven’t been an NBA fan since Doctor J retired. Too many gangster thugs running around in too many tattoos now. But I digress). All is forgiven for this year. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James were stellar team players and leaders, not to mention good American envoys. Kobe even took the time to tick off the American Left by talking up his patriotism and love of country (which even took Cris Collinsworth aback). In the end, the USA waltzed away with the Gold, and with the hearts of many of the Chinese fans.

USA Equestrians Jump to Gold

OK, so you’re surprised that I like the horses? Long story. Still, Team USA looked fantastic in winning the gold medal in the Team Jumping event. Beezie Madden and McClain Ward led the USA over Canada in a jumpoff for Gold – and in the process, legendary 61 year old, 9-time Olympic veteran Ian Millar won his first Olympic medal (the silver.)

The Bittersweet Hurdles

Liu Xiang was the defending Olympic champion, but a bad Achilles tendon made starting his race impossible. Yet, through the pain, Xiang lined up and at least tried to race. After another competitor false-started, however, the pain was too much and he limped off the track to the horrified gasps of the home crowd.

American champion Lolo Jones was leading the final after 8 hurdles, but tripped over the top of the ninth hurdle, somehow managed to clear the 10th hurdle, but finished 7th.

Lolo Jones and Liu Xiang are still champion athletes that can hold their heads high. They both conducted themselves with grace, even as they mourned their lost Olympic chance.

The Lows:

Russia’s Olympic Truce Aggression

Vladimir Putin shows his contempt for the international community, his neighbors, and the Olympic tradition by rolling troops and tanks into Georgia during the Opening Ceremonies, murdering civilians and bombing pipelines along the way. If the IOC had any guts, they would have kicked the Russians out, sent them home, and revoked the Sochi 2014 games. No such luck so far.

A Murdered American

As mentioned above, the in-laws of USA Volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon were attacked by a crazed Chinese man at a tourist spot in Beijing. Todd Bachmann died, and his wife Barbara was seriously injured.

Lipsynched Anthem during Opening Ceremony

So, what would your reaction be if you participated in a national singing contest for the right to sing your national anthem on live global television, you won that contest, and then were replaced at the last minute by “someone cuter.” Too much image consciousness led to a travesty for an 8-year old girl. Only the ChiComs would’ve even considered this blunder.

Gymnastics scoring and age questions

The Chinese also were involved in a scandal involving allegedly underage gymnasts (“fetal medalists” as the Jawas called them). But those questions were frankly overshadowed by the awful execution of a judging system that caused more questions than it answered, and led to some very questionable results – including women’s vault medalists who fell and landed out of bounds.

Boxing scoring debacle

As bad as the gymnastic scoring was, it couldn’t hold a candle to how awful the boxing venue was. There were rounds of Olympic boxing where dozens of punches were thrown and landed – and scored 0-0. The US team is alleging that there was misconduct of a political nature, pointing to the near systematic elimination of US and Russian boxers. I’m not so sure – I’d point to the comical ineptitude of a hopelessly broken system being run by hopelessly incompetent judges and officials. Olympic boxing is dead.

The end of Olympic Baseball and Softball

Now, the elimination of baseball and softball from the Olympic program can definitely be tied to the political anti-Americanism of IOC delegates. Jacques Rogge admitted as much in his final interview with Bob Costas. Most moving protest of the games – the USA softball players taking a page from the wrestling mat and placing their cleats on home plate to signify the ends of their careers after the gold medal match loss to Japan.

USA Track and Field Disappoints

OK, so USA Track and Field won more medals than any other nation. They were still a letdown from the dominance they were expected to achieve. No finalists in the men’s long, high, or triple jumps; or the javelin or 800m finals. Jamaica sweeping all six medal sprints. Two dropped batons in the 4x100 relays, preventing US teams from even reaching the finals. The injuries to Tyson Gay, Terrence Trammell, and Bernard Lagat. At least the 4x400 relays salvaged the day with impressive and exciting victories on the last night of competition.

Cuban athlete attacks judge

The video of a Cuban taekwondo guy kicking the judge in the head is surely going to become a youtube classis, but not for any good reason. It's good to see the athlete barred for life...

***

Olympic “Sports” that need to go away
Synchronized Swimming, Synchronized Diving, Rhythmic Gymnastics, Trampoline, BMX, Taekwondo, Judo, and (saddest to me) Boxing.

Sports to replace these with: Rugby, Golf, Softball.

Favorite athletes at these games: Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin, Hope Solo, Kobe Bryant, Allyson Felix, Lolo Jones, Jason Lezak, Dara Torres, Beezie Madden, Logan Tom, Kerri Walsh, Phil Dalhausser, Brian Clay, Kristin Armstrong, Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, Mariel Zagunis, Jonathan Horton, Henry Cejudo, Dmitri Klokov, Kosuke Kitajima.

Obama picks... Biden?

2008-08-22T12:07:00.006-04:00

The text messages are out this morning - Obama’s dithering on a Vice Presidential choice has left him with the unappealing choice of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.

On behalf of Republicans everywhere, I’d just like to say

WAY TO GO, BARACK!!!

First off, let’s see how Biden competes for the news cycle with the continued Russian invasion of Georgia and the end of the Olympic Games tonight. Delaying the timing past Tuesday the 5th was already a mistake (you simply don’t want to have your VP choice have to compete with Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, Kerri Walsh, or any other members of the USA Olympic Team’s Gold Medal winners… more on them over the weekend). But anyone who has ever watched the West Wing (much less actually worked communications) knows that you “take out the trash” on Friday – not announce some major new initiative, like, say, who your new running mate is going to be. (Hot Air is calling it “burying the pick”) Overnight Friday night? Even worse. So, this is a great way to diss your own running mate pick, while having the rest of the world not pay attention. It’s almost like he doesn’t want anyone to notice who he picked. There may be good reasons for that.

As a conservative, it’s just great to see Mr. Audacity of Hope and Change pick a Washington Beltway hack. Biden’s presence on the ticket undermines the “Change” raison d’etre of the Obama campaign, instantly transforming the Democrat ticket to yet another combination of failed liberal ideas espoused by two Washington insider Senators.

Further, it’s not like Biden helps nail anything down. Does he bring a battleground state? Delaware has been pretty solidly blue for some time now. A constituency? Nothing other than Beltway Insider. I suppose he does bring more Senatorial experience than Obama does, helping McCain make that attack (“Hey, at least his VP choice is more experienced than he is…”) He has less foreign policy experience than Bill Richardson, who should have been his ideal choice, and a domestic policy record that helps Republicans continue to pin down the Dems as hopelessly liberal on bread and butter issues. And he's never been an executive.

Choosing Biden does not help the far-left Obama reach out to the center of the political spectrum, which is exactly what he needed to do with sagging poll numbers and McCain’s much more solid performance at the Saddleback proto-debate. (Irony of these choices – both McCain and Obama need to choose running mates to their right.)

Then again, I’m sure they’ll be able to work well together. They certainly have one thing in common: plagiarism. Biden famously plagiarized speeches and law school work; Obama just stole speech material.

Overall Grade, for timing and selection: F+ The plus is only there because Biden is a solid enough debater when he's not committing gaffes.

Memo to John McCain: Learn from this. Don’t pick a Senator, pick a Governor from outside the Amtrak Corridor; one whose experience outshines Obama’s, but whose youth can serve as a complement to your experience. Oh, and make sure they’re pro-life. Here’s to hoping yesterday's NY Times reporting is correct…

UPDATE: Reaction coming in:

Chris Cilizza lays out "The Case against Joe Biden":

Over the course of his presidential bid, Biden cemented his reputation as -- how to put this nicely? -- less than disciplined on the campaign trail.

In the summer of 2006, as he was publicly mulling the race, Biden set off a controversy over comments he made about Indian Americans.

"I've had a great relationship [with Indian Americans]," Biden said. "In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

On the day he formally announced his candidacy, a New York Observer story that quoted Biden as calling Obama "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" came out, and the resultant uproar effectively undercut any momentum Biden was hoping to build.

***
Amanda Carpenter at TownHall:

Obama announced his VP in the dead of night AFTER CNN broke the story through a text message system that didn't work properly. FAIL.

My message didn't come through till 4:59 am. I see other people got theirs around 3:20. The text messages were not "instant" it was the same ol' master list dump every other politician uses that takes two or three hours to cycle through. Maybe the Obama team thought we wouldn't notice because we were all sleeping.

This guy can't even announce his VP smoothly (you know what I am going to say next) How can he run a country?

***

Politico headline: A stateman known for slips of his tongue

***
Jawa Report adds: "This is going to be more fun than Carter/Mondale '80."

Beach Volleyball Gold Medalists Thank President Bush

2008-08-21T15:31:00.003-04:00

Trip to Beijing: $1300

Years of work preparing: 4

Thanking the President of the United States after you win the Gold Medal: Priceless.

Pro-Life VP or Bust

2008-08-20T10:52:00.004-04:00

Cross-posted at SC Conservative

There has been a ton of speculation that John McCain may be considering a pro-abortion Vice Presidential nominee (bringing responses and pontifications at Politico, Hot Air, Rush, just to name a few).

I'm with the Hot Air folks on this one. A pro-abortion nominee like Lieberman (or Guiliani, or Ridge) would be an unmitigated disaster for McCain, perhaps the one last way he could derail his own campaign and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As a strategy, it would lead to the wholesale departure of the Republican base, (more than making up for any gains he would make with independents) and the resulting low-base turnout could lead to a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate - for the Democrats.

With those specters looming, do not expect the delegates at the Convention to go quietly on this point. I've been talking to some of my fellow delegates and alternates from around the state and around the country, and they do indeed have the stomach to fight their own nominee on this one. Remember: the delegates hold the power at the convention - and we can nominate someone of our own choosing to go up against a pro-abortion VP nominee. Alert pro-life Republican delegates are already organizing for a possible convention uprising if the need arises. Speculation centers around the same list of pro-life Governors that McCain has been said to be considering - Palin, Jindal, Romney, Pawlenty, and yes, Mark Sanford.

Hopefully, Senator McCain won't make the pro-abortion VP mistake, and will instead choose a running mate who can secure his base while he tacks to the middle in the general election campaign (which he does without really trying, frankly). With a 5 point lead (according to Zogby this morning), Senator McCain would be wise to secure his base and consolidate the lead with less than 3 months to go.

Revoke Sochi

2008-08-19T09:21:00.004-04:00

It appears that someone has found a push point in the Russian/Georgian conflict. Someone has a new website up petitioning the International Olympic Committee to revoke awarding the 2014 Winter Olympics to Sochi, Russia. Representatives Allyson Schwartz and Bill Shuster of PA have sponsored a bipartisan resolution asking the IOC to find a new venue for the 2014 Games.

This is the first real pressure point I've seen (not too many people calling for Russia to be removed from the G-8 yet, though that would be a strong step as well) that has a chance to succeed. When you consider the national pride and success that Beijing has seen as a result of their Olympic experience (certainly not without downside, but overall a very positive impact for China so far...), removing the chance for the Russians to have a similar experience when they thought they would have such a moment would be a strong deterrent from a domestic political standpoint.

Until that kind of serious and strong isolative pressure is brought, we will continue to see video of Russian "peacekeepers" rolling tanks over police cars while "withdrawing" during a "ceasefire". The Bad Old Days are back.

Lessons from South Ossetia

2008-08-13T16:42:00.004-04:00

Ceasefire or not, the Georgian/Russian conflict has already taught us some important (and unfortunate) things.

Vladimir Putin is the New Tyrant on the Block.

Call him Tsar Putin I or Vlad the Invader (or NTOTB), but Putin is now certainly the biggest baddest dude on the foreign policy block. This is yet another blow to Russia's democratic reformers, including former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who might have held out hopes that a change in Russia's Presidency would allow for an opportunity for reform. Instead, it is now blatantly clear that Putin is Prime Minister in name and President in function. (Russian "President" Dmitry Medvedev was on a boat cruise down the Volga while the invasion occurred; Putin was at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, with all the other heads of state.)

The historical role of Russia as an authoritarian state with expansionist tendencies is back, and more dangerous than ever.

Historians will surely point to South Ossetia as the Sudetenland of the early 21st Century, with Putin now using the same "reunification" and "protection" as cover for blatant and open aggression, just as Hitler did in 1938. Combine that with Tsar Putin's assertion that the Soviet demise was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century", and you have a recipe for disaster - a Russian nationalist dictator with Hitler's tendencies (including a top notch internal propaganda machine) and a lust for Stalin's brutality. Oh - and nukes. Let's not forget those.

The Cold War just reheated up, and America's prestige and international reputation is at stake, as is the promise of continued post-Soviet Eastern European democracy.

Only now, a new set of strategies will need to be employed. The old Cold War doctrine of containment may not be possible in the same ways as it was used in the last century. Georgia was applying for NATO membership, and was the third largest contributor of troops to the Iraq coalition. Yet it only had 30,000 troops at its disposal - absolutely no match for the Russians. If the Russians remain obstinate, and if, as now appears probable, Ukraine is next in line for Russian aggression, multiple democracies could get gobbled up into the new Russian empire without the West doing anything substantive to stop it. Would the US act militarily to protect one of Russia's neighbors? Doubtful - direct military conflict with the Russians is far too likely to go nuclear. Knowing this, Putin is free to act with impugnity, knowing that the old rules of Mutual Assured Destruction prevent us from stopping him. This is a tremendous challenge for NATO in a post-Soviet Cold War, now that most of Eastern Europe has gone the pro-US democracy route.

So, the leaders of the World (especially those of the free world) are going to have to figure out how best to punish Putin in a way that makes him think twice about future murderous land grabs. Ironically, any steps taken to destabilize Russia's economy would play directly into Putin's domestic political needs, making isolation very difficult. Also - we may be at a point where we need Russian oil more than Russia needs whatever the West is selling.

This will be the single greatest challenge the next President faces. Combine that with an ongoing civizational conflict with fundamentalist Islam, and the foreign policy outlook becomes rather grim. We are in for a long rough century, (or at least the next couple of decades) and it is going to take bold leadership and monumental strength of will for America to succeed.

As a postscript, I hold out zero hope that Barack Obama has either that will or that leadership.

Barack Obama gets Rickrolled?

2008-08-11T15:04:00.001-04:00

Whomever did this gets a Gold Medal for Video Editing...

Laugh on...

Random thoughts on this that and the other...

2008-08-11T09:09:00.005-04:00

Now that the Olympics are well under way (and consuming my television viewing habits for the nexxt two weeks - I'm a total Olympic junkie...), I thought I'd post a few thoughts...

***

Do you remember the long-held "Olympic Truce"? The idea was that nations competing in the Olympic Games would stop fighting long enough to enjoy the sporting events, and maybe even sit down long enough to work out their differences. (Hey, we were dealing with civilised nations at the time - Islamist countries need not apply...)

Well, it seems someone needed to remind President Vladimir Putin of that one. Putin's aggression against the former Soviet state of Georgia was possibly the most ill-timed invasion of all time - the tanks rolled over the border just as the Opening ceremonies were getting underway. Definitely the PR blunder of the year - Moscow rolls tanks as Beijing highlights new Century with best artistic opening ceremonies ever.

Oh - and kudos to President Bush for pulling Putin aside at those ceremonies to voice his displeasure. Bush has had one of the better weeks of his Presidency with these ceremonies - a deft diplomatic touch previously unseen, massaging the Chinese while speaking out against them openly. Definitely one of the highlights of his Presidency, when it's all said and done.

***

On the domestic front, what's this we hear about John McCain considering Joe Lieberman for his Veep nominee? How many Republicans with older vehicles would be scrambling to scrape "Sore Loserman" bumper stickers off from the Florida debacle?

Seriously - this is the single biggest mistake McCain could make right now. He has ALL of the momentum at present - Obama has botched his own Veep pick by failing to make it before the Olympics dominated the news cycle (whomever Obama picks cannot compete with Michael Phelps). McCain is his own best asset and ally to reach out to the middle, but his VP choice needs to shore up the base. If he sticks with the Palin/Pawlenty/Jindal/Sanford/Romney/Huckabee list, he's safe (and I'm still rooting for Palin...). But if he picks someone not provably pro-life, or worse, provably pro-choice (Lieberman or Ridge), he alienates the base entirely.

Hopefully, he'll do the smart thing and allow his VP choice to tack right while he remains in the middle.

***

Did anyone else stay up last night to watch that Olympic swimming relay (pic above)? Absolutely fabulous stuff. Favorite moments (other than when Lezak touched out the French at the wall, or the sheet brute force of the celebration pictured above): when in the interview segment, one of the swimmers referred to their loudmouthed, trash talking competitors as "those Frenchies." Awesome.

***

Anyone who has watched the last two golf majors (the PGA and the Open Championship) will be hard pressed to believe in global warming. That hoax must surely be winding down now...

***

Lastly, RIP to Shaft and Bernie Mac, both of whom passed away over the weekend. Two entertainers who will surely be missed...

Why I'm a Conservative Republican

2008-08-08T08:46:00.002-04:00

I have no idea who this is, but I endorse what he's saying - wholeheartedly.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-05T09:12:00.002-04:00

In case you missed it, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died over the weekend. For those who don't know, Solzhenitsyn was the anti-Soviet dissident whose writings (including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the The Gulag Archipelago) had a seminal impact on the conservative movement in the United States, especially on modern conservative foreign policy.

Ronald Reagan read Solzhenitsyn's work and redoubled his commitment to ending the Communist/Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn's work provided the West with a window into the horrors of Soviet despotism, and provided Reagan with a treasure trove of examples to put steel into the American spine and keep us focused on the inherent danger and evil of the Soviet state.

But Solzhenitsyn's impact remains today. His work inspired a generation of fellow Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov, the Russian nuclear scientist turned dissident who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 and died in 1989. It was Sakharov's young protege, Natan Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democracy is a "must read" within the current Bush Administration, and President Bush quoted it in his second inaugural address. Sharansky has since moved to Israel and is now a sitting member of the Knesset in the Likud Party.

Those of you who ever saw my first office at Club for Growth may recall that I had a "quote wall" of "deep thoughts" (for those of you who didn't see it, think Jack Handey, only inspiring conservatism instead of cheap laughs). Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky were both on that wall for these quotes:

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being? (Solzhenitsyn).

The drug of freedom is universally potent. (Sharansky)

May we not forget Solzhenitsyn's wisdom, and may he rest in peace.

Also Blogging: Earl Capps, Dan Cassidy

News, Notes, and Editorial Thoughts

2008-07-01T09:32:00.002-04:00

Satan-worshipping Democrats charged with rape, kidnapping, and assault

Johnson, who was third vice-chair of the Durham County Democratic Party and vice-chair for the Young Democrats, was charged with two counts of aiding and abetting. Prosecutors said she knew her husband planned the crime and watched as they were committed.

Y'know, I don't think we Republicans needed an excuse to start referring to the opposition party as "Satan-worshipping Democrats", but in case we did, warm and special thanks to the Durham County (NC) Democrat Party for handing us this little gem in July of an election year.

*****

RELATED? Obama rejects proposed CA Gay Marriage ban
Strange tactic for Obama to tack left in a general election cycle...

Oh, and the post-gay-marriage-lightning-strike-caused-wildfire count is now over 1400 in NorCal alone. Does make one wonder...

*****

THEN AGAIN - NYTimes: Obama cannot win the South
So, if McCain can capitalize on the gun issue and the gay marriage issue with an overarching theme of conservative judges (with the announcement last week of Fred Thompson's involvement in his judicial selection process), he can put even California into play, and Obama's tacking left to stop it? I don't know, still doesn't sound right to me...

*****

My (R) VP Frontrunner short list:
Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska
Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota
Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts
Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana
Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina.

If I had to put money on this one, I'm taking the slightly longer odds and betting on Palin. Just a hunch. She's a rock star for the pro-life community, a proven reformer, and fabulous on energy policy...

*****

The Shot has closed it's doors? Wasn't the same after Tim Cameron left anyways, just became a collection of YouTubes shilling for a single consulting firm. Vaya con Dios, Tim, and stay in touch...

*****

Also departing last month (though apparently only temporarily): notverybright. I guess shilling for Obama the flip-flopping, America-hating liberal became too difficult a task, even for nvb...

*****

Around the rest of the SC 'sphere:

tammy at Seeding Spartanburg starts a post with:

Ok. Let me start this post by saying I’m no economist.

...and then proceeds to prove that, most certainly, she's no economist. Might be time to rename that blog "Socialist Spartanburg"...

**

sic willie got married?
Hope springs eternal... (Congratulations!)

**

Anthony Palmer continues to crank out well-written, well thought out commentary on the political scene over at the 7-10. I have to give him credit for probably being the most most insightful objective commentator in SC at the moment. (I'm not objective - I'm a conservative commentator...)

**

New to the SC 'sphere: Carolina Truth Coalition, Palmetto Politico, and Bill McAfee's Stewardship Journal. All interesting reads...

Thoughts on a long month

2008-06-27T08:31:00.002-04:00

OK, so... it's been a very long month. A few too many long days, and the blog has suffered for it - apologies.

Let's catch up, shall we?
*****

California judges institute gay marriage; thousands of lightning strikes follow, causing hundreds of brush fires; Bay Area choked in smoke
Surely somebody should have seen this one coming...

*****

McCain comes out for CA Marriage Amendment
A play for California? This issue plus the gun issue could put Obama in trouble in a lot of places. If only he'd flip on ANWR drilling (and at $4/gallon, how can you not?) and get tough on immigration, he'd be a shoo-in. As it is, we're headed for another tight red-blue election season.

*****

DC Gun ban overturned as Supreme Court reaffirms constitutionality of Second Amendment in 5-4 ruling
...you mean we have four Supreme Court justices who don't think that rights enumerated in the constitution are "individual" rights? Yikes.

Still, this is a great victory for those of us who believe the Constitution means what it says and what the Founders meant it to say.

*****

McCain says Fred Thompson will help pick judges in his administration
See previous headline - or do you think Barack "bitter gun clinger" Obama will pick constitutionalist judges? Whatever else you think of McCain (more to follow...), this is surely the reason conservatives will wind up rallying to his side. Scalia is going to need reinforcements - and Ginsburg and Stevens are getting neither younger nor healthier...

*****

Supreme Court strikes down "millionaires amendment" portion of McCain-Feingold
The more times that awful law is challenged on constitutional grounds, the more it loses... Chalk up another one for Freedom of Speech.

*****

Supreme Court strikes down death penalty for raping children
A defeat for Jessica's Law, to be sure. Louisiana responds by mandating chemical castration for pedophiles - Any Senators here want to take up that challenge?

*****

Released Guantanamo detainee joins Iraqi suicide attack
Those of you pushing to close Gitmo - seven dead Iraqis for you to explain...

*****

Goose Creek Two update: Mohamed pleads guilty to terrorism charge, faces 15 years in prison
Fireworks... uh huh...

*****

South Carolina teachers experiment with "new math"
Y'know, because we needed for our educational system to look even more stupid than it already does. Is it any wonder we can't graduate literate high school graduates if "a-tooty-ta" is how we're teaching math to kindergartners?

Then again, I was doing algebra as I skipped kindergarten, so what do I know...

*****

House and Senate overturn abstinence education funding veto
(and thank you all for the kind notes...) I do still wish more of those other budget vetoes would've been upheld - we're still one bad breakfast away from a deadly prison riot, and the Dept of Corrections Boys also need reinforcements, and body armor equipment, and increased detainee space, and maybe another Supermax...

*****

Knotts beats Shealy in Senate 23 runoff
Come to think of it, I may need body armor, too...

*****

Bright beats Talley in Senate 10 runoff
Way to go, Somer!!

*****

I'd also be remiss if I didn't note with sadness the passing of some legendary broadcasters who shaped so many of us in the television age. Tim Russert, Jim McKay, and Charlie Jones - Gentlemen, all. Russert was the greatest political interviewer and TV personality of his generation - and taken far too soon. McKay was the voice of the Olympics - who can forget his coverage of the Munich tragedy, or the joy of the Miracle on Ice. Al Michaels may have had the memorable call, but when he was done, it was McKay who was with the celebrating fans in the Olympic Village summing it all up. Jones was the voice of the NFL and many Olympic sports for decades. The Beijing Games simply won't be the same this year.

Rest in Peace, you will not soon be forgotten.

Going to MN!

2008-06-01T10:28:00.004-04:00

It's official - I've been elected as a statewide alternate to the Republican National Convention!!

I'd like to thank each and every one of my readers and fellow delegates who chose me for this position - you know who you are, and I am grateful to you for your support. We will need to stand strong for our across-the-board conservative principles if we are to reclaim the leadership of our country, in the Congress and the Executive branches.

Again - thank you.

On Budget Vetoes

2008-05-29T09:15:00.004-04:00

Those of you who have known me for a while know that I consider myself an "across-the-board" conservative - Fiscal, Social, and Security (both border and defense). This is one of the reasons I'm running for National Delegate on Saturday - we need across-the-board conservatives to represent our Party in Minneapolis.

As evidence of my fiscal conservatism, last year, during Governor Sanford's budget veto process, I put together a "Lard List" for the South Carolina Club for Growth (where I was Executive Director at the time) of a dozen or so items (or types of items) that we thought should be excised from the budget. I'm grateful that the Governor agreed with a number of them, and fifty of his vetoes become the "Lard List" that we fought to keep out of the state budget.

Of course, showing my true prowess as a short-lived lobbyist, the Legislature responded by making a focused effort to overturn those particular fifty votes, called me out on the House floor, and literally turned to wave goodbye after the fiftieth vote went down. And now, I'm gainfully employed elsewhere...

All of which to say, I think I have a pretty solid history as a fiscal conservative.

This year's budget vetoes came out yesterday, and again, I agree with most of them. Governor Sanford has done great work trying to cut the fat from state government without cutting muscle - and his stated intention of funneling the money to the Prisons Department is absolutely correct - as I've written before, that budget has been cut too hard, too often, and now places our law enforcement folks at risk as a result. Jon Ozmint has been right about that for years now, and whatever paltry help we can get him as a result of the budget veto process will be worth it.

But, there are two vetoes that I disagree with this year, and would urge my friends in the House, even my fellow fiscal conservatives, to override these two particular vetoes.

The first involves funding for I-73. There is a move underfoot to increase the gas tax (which B.R. Skelton proposed unsuccessfully last year) to pay for infrastructure. The best alternative to this approach is to cut wasteful spending (hence the other budget vetoes) and spend general fund money on roads and bridges (like I-73). Is $1M going to build the freeway? No, but it's a start, and with our broken budgeting system, that's how we have to fund roads like this one - in fits and starts. Funding the road from the general fund is a great example of why we do NOT need the tax hike.

Make no mistake - I-73 is necessary, as anyone who has ever tried to drive to Myrtle Beach can attest. This will be a boon to the tourism industry in our state (an industry which we unfortunately over-rely on) and an economic advantage in the long run. And, road construction is certainly a legitimate function of state government (unlike the piggie festivals in the "Competitive Grants" monstrosities). Hopefully the House and Senate will restore those funds when they vote on the vetoes.

The other issue is one of abstinence education, where $1.2 million in funding for abstinence education and teen pregnancy prevention was cut. These programs, especially abstinence education, have effectively cut the teen pregnancy rate in South Carolina by 35% over the last ten years.

Last month, our friends over at the Palmetto Family Council noted a nationwide study that broke down the financial impact of teen pregnancy and divorce in South Carolina. This state spends $469 million a year in social programs, incarcerations, and lost tax revenue because of fragmented families. Of that, $227 million was for the Justice System alone. Next to that, a preventive investment of $1.2 million seems like a very wise choice.

The parents of our school children agree - 80% of parents surveyed by a USC research team stated that schools should emphasize abstinence in their sex education classes.

That seems like one of the “priorities of South Carolinians” to me. It’s also one of the only conservative social education programs out there, a drop in the bucket next to the billions lost to the bureaucratic abyss of the Department of Education.

I do hope that the House and Senate will make the wise choice by restoring this funding.

Out of State Groups in District 23 backing... Knotts?

2008-05-22T17:47:00.005-04:00

Very interesting post card hitting in Senate 23 today - the NRA's ILA (also known as the Incumbent Legislator Award) is endorsing Senator Jake Knotts from the safety of their offices in Fairfax, Virginia. The card (seen here) was mailed out from "Suburban, MD".

Four items of note for irony or newsworthiness with this piece.

First, this comes on the heels of his last campaign mailer, which included dead people (Louis Shealy), convicted felons (Charlie Sharpe), and a whole array of people who have since told the Knotts campaign they never gave their permission. That probably warrants it's own story, but I know the local newsies are working on it, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Second, Senator Knotts cannot open his mouth or send a mail piece without screaming about "out-of-state special interests", "Wall Street Billionaires", "Walmart-style Schools" and the like. One wonders if he'll denounce the out-of-state intrusion on his behalf. (/sarc)

Third, the out of state group in question kinda got his name wrong on the headline. If you look close at the image's second line (I zoomed in on the back half) you'll notice they asked the voters of District 23 to "Vote for Judy Boyle". Now, as everyone in Lexington County surely knows, Judy Boyle is running for District 9 in the Idaho House. That happens to be only 2472 miles away from downtown Lexington, according to Yahoo Maps. Here's to hoping Jakie's voters write her in on June 10...

Finally, the mailer specifically references Knotts' support for concealed weapons reciprocity. This is interesting, since Knotts spent all of his debate time on Monday night (a debate Shealy won handily, according to the audience who cast straw poll ballots) bashing reciprocity for CWP holders, and likened reciprocity supporters to the "ACLU". No, I don't know what he was blathering about, but it's still entertaining to figure out how he was against it Monday, but for it Thursday afternoon. (this is the inverse of last week, when he claimed to be for mandatory "e-Verify" on Monday night before voting against it on Thursday afternoon).

It will be interesting to see if Jakie keeps trying to play the "out of state" card now that these are running around the district, and it will be interesting to see what else Knotts flip-flops about over the next 3 weeks.

Congradulations, Earl Capps

2008-05-11T09:20:00.002-04:00

So in the midst of a hectic work schedule (hey, with 4 weeks to the election, did you expect any less?) I did find some time this weekend to head down the highway to Moncks Corner yesterday to attend the Masters party for fellow right-side blogger Earl Capps.

The food was great, the company terrific, and future 6th District Congressman Mike Reino did an excellent job of roasting Earl (as did a number of other friends). Remind me to block off cell phone time if Earl calls... :-)

Seriously, Earl, congrats! I know that you worked hard to obtain that degree, and how hard it must've been to do that while working and providing for two children as a single dad. You have much to be proud of, and much to be grateful for.

I'm sure we'll talk again soon...

Senate Republican Caucus on Immigration Reform: Thank you Jim Ritchie

2008-05-06T15:14:00.003-04:00

Just noted a press release/blog post from the folks at the Senate Republican Caucus: Thank you Jim Ritchie. The thrust of the Thank You Note is for his leadership on tax issues and immigration reform. The Caucus also notes that they've put up a new website: ThankYouJim.com.

Now, I have to admit I like Senator Ritchie, who I regard as one of the brightest policy minds in the Senate. We don't always agree on issues, but Jim's intellect on policy matters is unquestionable. I happen to give him tons of credit for trying to advance the illegal immigration bill for the past two years - I know others have faulted him for some of the steps taken along that process, but on balance, Ritchie's work has been invaluable to the debate. Without fear of contradiction, I can say that without Senator Ritchie's efforts and leadership, we would not have a state immigration bill to discuss right now. Hence the new website.

That being said - since when is the Caucus putting up websites? And, does this mean there's a "ThankYouJakie".com in the works? If so, what would they thank him for - obstruction of every major Republican reform and tax cut in the past four years?

Let's see, he's the major Senate force undermining concealed carry, he's the major force trying to stop e-Verify in the Senate, he single-handedly delayed DUI reform by a year and a half with his DUI trial lawyer buddy Brad Hutto, he was a thorn in the side of anyone trying for meaningful workers comp reform, he voted against income tax cuts, the hits just keep on coming...

At the end of the day in Ritchie's case, he's getting criticized for trying to push the agenda forward (and defended by the Caucus for trying to do the right things). That's far from true in Knotts case. I hope we don't see the Caucus try that one on for size.

Random Thoughts

2008-05-01T11:01:00.005-04:00

Just a few notes on this and that...

***

For those of you who listen to the weekly Andy Thomas Show hits, you'll know we talked this morning about Obama's poll numbers. Here's the latest from Rasmussen: Hillary is up ten points on Obama nationwide in the three days since the Rev. Wright press conference.

Maybe, just maybe, Wright's linking the United States Marine Corps to Christ's crucifixion was a bit of a stretch.

Sooner or later, the twenty-year relationship with Jeremiah Wright finishes Barry O. The only question now is who gains, Clinton (in time for the convention) or McCain in the General. Even "throwing Wright under the bus" won't help now - that time was two months ago.

***

I don't know who this Indiana "Republican" Congressional candidate jokeris kidding, but the sooner he disappears from the political scene, the better. We've never been the "Hitler Party", and we aren't about to start now. His anti-Semitic hatred is not welcome in our party.

Illinois Nazis? Well, we can't stand Indiana Nazis either.

The Indiana Nazis have no more place in the modern political dialogue than Jeremiah Wright/Louis Farrakhan should. Both forms of bigotry are equally obnoxious.

***

Global Warming on Hold for another Decade, due to "natural variations in ocean currents". Ummm... don't you think maybe it was those same variations that might've contributed to some temporary warming ten years ago? (since we already know that the Earth cooled more than a Fahrenheit degree last year alone.)

Memo to John McCain: Jump off the Global Warming Bandwagon while you still have the chance. The sooner you do it, the bigger the long-term gain will be when we have climate alarmists in fur coats explaining that man-made warming will be coming around any old day now...

Oh, and don't forget the solar pattern/cosmic ray/cloud seeding theories from our Danish friend, Henrik Svensmark. When in climate doubt, never underestimate the power of the Big Ball of Fire in the Sky...

***

Dueling Headlines:
Senate passes Immigration bill that includes fines for businesses who hire illegals vs. SC has fastest growing Hispanic population

Just a guess, but I'd say those two are related, and the first headline will significantly alter the longterm impacts of the second one. One of the key reasons for the growth in SC is the GA law that passed last year to crack down on illegal immigration there. I strongly suspect that will change once our Legislature finally comes to agreement and passes a strong bill.

I will also note that the second story studiously avoids mentioning the number of illegal immigrants included in that statistic.

***

Thomas Ravenel goes to prison in GA in May.

I haven't blogged my thoughts about the Ravenel case yet. I still think it's one of the saddest stories I know - a friend who we didn't know was going through a struggle with drugs, a friend with a brilliant mind and a bright future, all thrown away because of the power of cocaine. I hope he uses this time to reflect on his own mortality, on his need for repentance and forgiveness, and come out a changed man. He may not have a future in public political life, but he can still have a future, and I pray he realizes that and reacts accordingly.

Dennis Prager: Time Fights Carbon Emissions; Military Fights Evil

2008-04-22T08:33:00.002-04:00

This nails it for today - the original is posted on RealClearPolitics. (Emphasis mine)
By Dennis Prager

The state of the liberal mind is on display on this week's cover of Time magazine.

The already notorious cover takes the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima and substitutes a tree for the flag. Why Time's editors did this explains much about contemporary liberalism.

The first thing it explains is that liberals, not to mention the left as a whole, stopped fighting evil during the Vietnam War. As I wrote in my last column, whereas liberals had led the fight against Nazism before and during World War II, and against Communism after the War, the liberal will to fight Communism, the greatest organized evil of the post-War world, collapsed during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War did to American liberals what World War I did to most Europeans -- it rendered them anti-war rather than anti-evil.

That is why liberals have gone AWOL in the fight against Islamic totalitarianism. As during the post-Vietnam Cold War, when liberals fought anti-Communists much more than they fought Communists, they fight anti-Islamists much more than they fight Islamists. Thus, Democrats routinely dismiss the Bush administration's talk about the threat of Islamic terror as "scare tactics."

But -- and this is a primary reason for Time's cover -- liberals know that they have largely opted out of the fight against Islamists; their only passion on this matter is abandoning the war against Islamists in Iraq. But like nearly all people who believe in a cause, they know that they have to fight some evil -- after all, the world really seems threatened by something. So they have channeled their desire to fight threats to the world to fighting an enemy that will not hurt them or their loved ones -- man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil. You will be celebrated at Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the BBC and throughout the media world, no one will threaten your life, there are huge grants available to scientists and others who fight real or exaggerated environmental problems, and you may even receive an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. Individuals who fight Islamists get fatwas.

The Time cover is cheap heroism. It is a liberal attempt to depict as equally heroic those who fight carbon emissions and those who fought Japanese fascists and Nazis.

Second, for much of the left, the cover reflects the primacy of environmental concerns over moral concerns. For example, the left seemed never to care about the millions of Africans who continued to die from malaria largely because of the environmentalists' worldwide ban on the use of DDT as pesticide. The same holds true for another leftwing environmentalist fantasy. Changing corn into biofuels is causing a surge in food prices throughout the world. The European Union continues this policy despite warnings even from some environmentalists that food shortages, starvation and food riots are imminent. But human suffering is not as significant as environmental degradation.

Third, the left is far more internationalist -- global, if you will -- in its orientation than national. As the Time article states, "Going green: What could be redder, whiter and bluer than that?" Whereas, for most Americans patriotism remains red, white and blue, for much of the left it is green.

Fourth, the further left you go, the more inclined you are to hysteria. From the threat of DDT to the threat of heterosexual AIDS in America to that mass killer secondhand smoke, the left believes and spreads threats that, unlike the threat of Islamic terror, really are "scare tactics."

Years from now, Time's cover will be regarded as another silly media-induced fear. But, as with Time's 1974 article warning its readers about "another ice age" and its many articles on the threat of heterosexual AIDS in America, Time will just let public amnesia deal with credibility problems. Until then, however, one fact remains: Today, conservatives fight evil and liberals fight carbon emissions. That's what this week's cover of Time is about.

Goose Creek Update: Life In Prison, and a New York Connection?

2008-04-17T13:01:00.005-04:00

For those of you who read this when it was the old Body Politic, you'll remember the coverage of the two "youths" who were arrested in Goose Creek outside the Naval Weapons Center there. Pictures to left.

Yesterday, a federal grand jury handed down indictments against both men which add up to possible sentences of 65 years to life. These new indictments supersede prior charges.

Today, a third man (also a USF student) was charged by the FBI, allegedly in relation to weapons charges and support for terrorism. This new defendant, Karim Moussaoui, apparently has New York connections. This is just starting to play out.

***

Odd note of the story: Jonathan Turley, the law professor that most of us would remember as defending President Clinton on the cable news shows during the impeachment proceedings, is apparently defending Sami al-Arian, the USF professor who may have started Mohamed and Megahed on this particular terror journey. Now he's trying to claim that these new charges for al-Arian's cohorts are spurious (these charges don't make his client look very good, if proven true). Interesting and strange connection there...

Also reporting/blogging: Michele Malkin, Debbie Schlussel, Tampa Bay Observer

Random Monday Thoughts on Presidential politics

2008-04-14T11:45:00.005-04:00

Barack Obama thinks small town voters are "bitter", and that their bitterness drives them to guns and religion?

Hasn't that pretty much been the Democrat Party Platform since the late 1960s?

I'm just glad he had the honesty to tell us what he really thinks. What thinking evangelical leaders can possibly take his candidacy seriously now?

Matt Lewis (of TownHall and the Leadership Institute) sums it up nicely:

The most disturbing aspect of this entire scandal is that Obama's comments demonstrate how liberals truly view religion: As unwelcome competition to government -- their real savior.

Newt piles on:

If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans. Their beliefs are so alien to your leftwing viewpoint that you have to seek some psychological explanation for what seem to be weird ideas.

They can’t really believe in the right to bear arms.

They can’t really believe in traditional marriage.

They can’t really believe in their faith in God.

They can’t really want to enforce the law on immigration.

Therefore, they must be “bitter” and “frustrated.”

This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife’s view that “America is a mean country”. Not since Governor Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was in a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.

***

Not that Hillary can fully take advantage, since her Hubby won't shut up about the Tuzla canard... Clinton Fatigue II, the Return...

Honestly, I don't know who to root for on the D side, the Marxist or the Serial Liar.

***

Is it any wonder, then, that McCain has taken small leads in Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania... and New York??!? This is going to be a fifty state race, but with Hillary and Obama shooting their own feet, you've got to think McCain wins out if the Dems can't hold on to big blue states.

***

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter sums up what's been wrong with Democrat Presidential foreign policy for three decades: "I've been meeting with Hamas leaders for years."

The politics of intimidation?

2008-03-27T15:01:00.003-04:00

This is my mirror, as I found my car this morning. Pardon the fuzzy picture - I took this with my phone. Note the eggshell stuck in the space between the mirror and the window, and the pieces of yolk and egg white smeared along the bottom of the window.

Fair warning - I don't intimidate easily. Hitting my car (with over 114K miles on the odometer) with the embryonic remains of a chicken isn't going to do it. Just gives me more motivation.

Oh, and you also tore off the mirror of my next door neighbor's kid's car. Real great work there, Sherlock...

Reason #1 to cut (or eliminate) the income tax

2008-03-27T10:57:00.004-04:00

The State newspaper this morning reports that South Carolina's per capita income continues to lag behind the rest of the country. This year our growth was 4.2%, a full point behind the national growth of 5.2%. South Carolina now boasts the 4th lowest per capita income in the nation, slipping from 6th worst a year ago. (Yep, another statistic to be proud of.)

I find it interesting (in a strange, crazy sort of way) that The State can report this statistic without bringing up the obvious reason behind the statistic - an income tax rate that ranks among the ten highest in the country. When you tax productivity and success, you lose business - it's really that simple. Yet we get caught up in the property tax debates and sales tax debates, and our legislature never gets around to cutting the one tax that has a direct impact on our ability to create wealth and jobs - the income tax.

Why do we think it is that we have none of the Top 100 companies in America headquartered in South Carolina? If we, for instance, want to become the haven for the energy companies, taking advantage of the Savannah River site's unique potential to generate hydrogen fuel, we have to have a tax structure that companies want to take advantage of. Or do you think Microsoft landing in Washington state was simply by chance? Washington state has no state income tax, preferring instead to rely on other, lower taxes and a robust economy. That's the formula for success.

What's worse, since no income tax cut is coming this year to stimulate our state's economy, we can already look forward to having this report be just as bad (or worse) next year. Hopefully those who are elected this fall will pay more attention next spring when this report resurfaces.

In the meantime, way to go guys, thanks for keeping us down - again.

Random thoughts with three dots

2008-03-26T15:11:00.004-04:00

OK, so I'm not sure how related all of this really is, but it's running around in my brain, so here goes...

Rod Shealy caught with dirty tricks before the race even gets started? Shocked, I say, just shocked... I'm sure he'd never do that in any other race... or arrange for threats... or have people followed... or get unemployed fishermen into the race... nah, not good ole' Rod... (...just sayin')

Just as shocking: Tompkins & Sullivan's mouthpiece racing to Shealy's defense, in an attempt to take whatever the potshot of the day is at the Governor (as well as lay down the marker for future dirty tricks, no doubt). Definitely dog bites man stuff, but still...

(Side note, why do all of the consultant bloggers hate the Governor so much? I haven't figured it out, other than that he doesn't pay them, or they're tired of the second term already a la Bush/Cheney circa 2006... I've never been on his payroll, but that doesn't mean I feel the need to continually bash a sitting Republican Governor with an approval rating in the 70s...)

My take on the Ceips/Shealy/Bates Illegal alien affair: Shealy, Bates and the alien should all get fired. The alien should then work on a green card and list "actor" as his occupation...

Then you've got this "story" out of the Spartanburg Herald Journal, apparently alleging that nefarious groups are trying to influence state politics. You know those nefarious types - the State Chamber of Commerce, the REALTORs, BIPEC, Palmetto Family Council... OH wait, that's not who you thought I was going to say? Well, read to the bottom of the story (Ok, about 2/3 of the way down) to the paragraph entitled "Group Auditions". Bam - there's the list. Ricky B (and his planted mouthpiece Jason Spencer) thinks these are "outside groups"? Umm, we conservatives usually refer to small businesses, family values folks, and limited government types as "the Republican base". But hey, don't let that stop you from writing the story...

"Wilson Charles" at the Other Brooks Brothers has the right of this:

I always thought that in a representative government like ours, it was our duty to practice advanced citizenship. I’m not talking about that garbage they force you to swallow in elementary school about being nice to everyone. I’m talking about really getting involved.

It’s more than taking a few minutes out of your day to vote every now and then (which not enough people do anyway).

It means that as an American and as a South Carolinian, you should know what your leaders think and feel. You should know if they represent you. You should know if what they do in office is what they said they would do in the slickly designed campaign pamphlet somebody shoved in your door when you weren’t home.

The disturbing thing is that Spartanburg’s NEWSpaper actually condoned the line of thought coming from the party and consultants. Its editors sanctioned and published an article that seemed to include few facts except that someone ran polls.

One consultant accidentally made sense among those quoted in the piece. He said that there are “as many people recruiting candidates, and as many agendas, as you can count.”

What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what we want? Don’t we want South Carolina’s best in public office? Don’t we want to elect people who believe like we do so that our thoughts and feelings are represented at City Hall, County Council, the Statehouse, or Congress?

I have to agree with that...

Then there's the little gem of a quote from the aforementioned Mr. Sullivan.

These third-party groups are spreading like a rash.

Somehow, that sounds familiar... Didn't Cindi Scoppe call them a "cancer"? And the forementioned Mr. Tompkins called them a "scourge"?

Y'all stay classy, now...

Speaking of classy, the Tompkins & Sullivan mouthpiece has now also attempted to "out" Brooks Brothers columnist Wilson Charles as belonging to another new consultancy group. Y'know, just for once, I'd love to see these consultant blogs focus on actual issues instead of constant attacks on each other...

But, I suppose that's way too much to ask for...

Obama Reax - It's not the Racism, it's the intellectual dishonesty

2008-03-20T09:02:00.002-04:00

I haven't had a whole lot of time to think about the Obama speech (still haven't, really), but I was struck by the unbelievability of the speech more than anything.

Apparently, I wasn't alone.

Victor Davis Hanson pointed out the relativistic nature of the speech, with a hidden rejection of absolutes that guts it of any moral authority.

The tragedy of Obama's speech and the mindless endorsement of it was the rejection of any constant moral standard—an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars. And once one jettisons such absolutes, they won't be there when one wishes to seek refuge in them in a future hour of need.

When he failed to "disown" Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright's racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol.

Newt Gingrich went on Cavuto's FoxNews show to declare the speech "intellectually dishonest." Video at the link.

All things considered, though, it's these two YouTube efforts that best describe what went wrong with this speech. The first shows Obama flip flopping on what he knew and when he knew it. The second compares Obama's own words to those of his wife and his pastor. I think I see the beginnings of a 527 negative ad in that second clip.

First the flipflop:

Then the comparison:

No matter what, this will serve as ammunition for Hillary's campaign, who will surely continue to run the "Red Phone" ad as a contrast to Obama's inconsistency and unreadiness. If she fail to capitalize on this inconsistency, Senator McCain surely will.

Random Thoughts from Around the Blogosphere

2008-03-12T09:00:00.006-04:00

First, I'd like to welcome those of you who have been invited by the Huckster to vote for his VP consideration in our poll (upper right).

Congratulations - you're the new Paul-bots.

Next time you run into your "Christian Leader", try asking him why he left the ministry to go into politics? Isn't that leaving the higher calling for a lower calling?

Was it that he needed the money, so he could go on trips to the Caymans in the middle of a campaign to make paid speeches? Was it that he knew his son would become the foreshadowing of Michael Vick? Or was it that his wife wasn't getting enough Hooters time? And that's not even getting to the whole "wrong side of the Southern Baptist split" thing.

Any way you cut it, Huckster's done politically. Not quite Eliot Spitzer done, but finished nonetheless.

*****

Speaking of Spitzer, Brad Warthen is complaining that too many people are laughing ("sniggering") at the soon to be demise of the New York Democrat Governor. Me, I'm laughing hard, and so are the late-night comics apparently. ("Just goes to show you how ridiculously high the standard of living is in New York City" - Heh.)

I mean, the guy allegedly felt the need to put a hooker (oops, sorry, "High Priced Call Girl") on a train in New York and bring her to Washington (hence the rumored interstate trafficking and money laundering charges). If he really needed to find a whore in Washington, all he needed to do was show up on Capitol Hill and look for the lobbyists... (*rim shot*)

*****

I see FITS has exposed the secret of the week (the true identity of "Harden Gervais" over at Sunny/Shady.) I had seriously suspected Wes and Corey, but hadn't had the proof until this morning. (Corey was the chief writer of seemingly every crazy conspiracy story in print about my employment over the last two years. While I'm flattered at the attention, if you're covering me, you're probably missing the point. This goes for Ross Shealy as well, though Ross has better photoshop skills than Shady Gervais does.)

Now, Corey tried denying this in comments in FITS (OK, well, sort of denying, while admitting he had done some of the "guest writing"), but within hours, Shady was posting an apology that included the nugget that they were done blogging. That's not just a coincidence, kids...

*****

Speaking of FITS, Hades may be in freezing danger. FITS, notverybright and I agreeing on the same issue? (that the Kentucky proposal to ban anonymous internet speech would be blatantly unconstitutional) Break out the ski gear...

Seriously, why is it always Republicans that come up with the Soviet style speech stuff? Aren't we supposed to be the Party that protects the Constitution? Oh, I guess that whole "Party Platform" thing doesn't actually apply to elected officials, my bad...

*****

Speaking of Shady People and Hugh Leatherman, what's this we read about a "Reform Caucus" made up of a bunch of old-line legislators who wouldn't know reform if it bit them and left a mark? If Sandifer and Leatherman think they can get fool people with this stunt, they're in for a pretty large surprise.

Though I certainly like and respect Senators Cromer, Cleary, and Thomas, I do hope their rumored involvement in a sham reform group like this turns out to be false. This won't help them with Republican voters or folks who actually care about achieving real reform in our state.

UPDATE: FITS claims to have documentation that points to Rod Shealy's organization of the "Reform Caucus". That would be an interesting development.

NEW POLL ----->

2008-03-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

With my thoughts below on strengths, weaknesses, and odds, who do YOU think John McCain should pick as his running mate? Cast your Vote in the upper right corner of the blog.