My Emergency Evacuation: Good-Bye to the Big Easy; Hello, Sweet Home Alabama

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — I’m blogging from the studios of WTKI 1490 AM, where today I was a guest on the Film Ladd radio show, a fantastic multimedia experience — radio, chatroom, live video camera. The host, Ladd Ehlinger, is a brilliant independent film director and all-around virtuoso.

Ladd called me Sunday morning while I was on my way to breakfast in the French Quarter of New Orleans and invited me to be his guest in-studio, and then to attend tonight’s Republican 5th District congressional debate at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. So I had to hit deadline quickly for my American Spectator column about the Southern Republican Leadership Conference:

Far from the main stage, away from the television cameras and unnoticed by reporters covering the speeches by famous names, other stories were developing, stories of potentially greater importance — and certainly more urgent than the question of who will carry the Republican banner in a presidential election more than two years in the future.
For hundreds of GOP congressional candidates, the only date that matters is not 2012, but Nov. 2 — now less than seven months away — and for many of those candidates, their campaigns will end sooner, as multi-candidate primaries have become the rule rather than the exception in a mid-term free-for-all perhaps destined to be known as the Year of Republican Hope. . . .

Please read the whole thing. I’ll be back to update later with more news, photos and video, as well as the explanation for my 18-hour absence from blogging. The New Orleans voodoo ate my WiFi . . .