At least five top advisers to former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty have been working for little or no pay for several months, a campaign source said Wednesday.
The news establishes with more certainty the emerging portrait of Pawlenty as struggling to keep up with the larger and better-funded operation of his main rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. . . .
While some staffers are temporarily forgoing a larger paycheck, others signed up with the understanding that they would volunteer their time for the long term, said the Pawlenty aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters. . . .
They’re trying to spin this as a good thing:
“Our consultants are either volunteering their time or working for peanuts,” he said. “This may be hard for some in Washington to accept, but they’re on Team Pawlenty for the right reasons — they believe in the candidate and cause.”
There was a strong reaction to yesterday’s post about Courtney Stodden, the 16-year-old aspiring singer who married her 51-year-old manager, actor Doug Hutchison, and so I’m sure readers will find lots to say about this bit of information: Courtney’s new husband is four years older than her father.
“We all needed a good man in our lives,” said Krista, adding the 35-year age gap does not faze her. “After a while you don’t look at the age. You look at the love they started to have towards each other. He became more than a number to us.”
Courtney, an aspiring actress, model and pop singer, met her husband when he began managing her career. Her parents welcomed Hutchinson, who is four years older than his new father-in-law, into their lives when he started dating their daughter.
“He was her manager, and then as we got to know him, we got to see what kind of person he was,” Krista said. “He just became a wonderful person in our eyes, and he’s a great Christian man.” . . .
“She never thought that she would find the right person and when she found Doug, she said ‘I never really wanted to get married but I found someone perfect for me and you never know what age you’re going to find that person at’,” said Krista.
According to Krista, Courtney is used to being in the spotlight. She began modeling at the age of 12 and by 14 she was hosting her own online show called “The Courtney Stodden Show.”
Courtney has also been the victim of cyber bullying, addressing many hurtful comments she has encountered on her YouTube channel.
“Courtney is used to this type of reaction towards her,” said Krista. “She’s a very beautiful girl and she stands out, because she’s shockingly beautiful when you see her in person. She reads some of the negative things people wrote about her but she’s strong.”
And now, to answer a question to which you probably didn’t really want the answer (at least not from her mom):
“Everything is real,” insists Krista. “Usually when girls have little cute bodies, they don’t have large breasts, but she’s had no work done, and she doesn’t need anything done.”
OK, so there’s lots of comment fodder there — read the whole thing — but just for good measure, I’ll stir the pot by semi-defending this mismatched marriage. (It’s been called a “May-December” match, but isn’t it really more like April-October?)
Look, it’s show business. We’ve seen many, many examples of how ex-child stars like Lindsay Lohan crash and burn when they hit their 20s. (Lindsay has apparently averted her jail sentence.) Given how commonly these young women in Hollywood go bonkers, which is the greater risk: Letting your daughter go into show business at 16, or letting her get married at 16?
Go ahead, then. Feel free to predict a disastrous outcome for Doug and Courtney’s marriage. But how many Hollywood marriages end “happily ever after” anyway?
But wait — there’s more! Here is video of Courtney competing two years ago in a beauty pageant. She introduces herself at the 1:22 mark, then appears in the swimsuit competition at the 1:40 mark, and in evening gown competition at 3:15:
And she was only 14 years old, you sick freaks.
UPDATE: But wait — there’s still more! Here’s a video Courtney did last year about “Cyber Bullies & Cyber Victims”:
“I get harassed daily on the Internet,” she says, reading some of the cruel, rude comments people have made about her. You kinda wonder if maybe one reason she was so eager to get married was to have a refuge from all that. Haven in a Heartless World, so to speak.
UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! For those kicking this topic around in the comments, let me ask: Is your objection to the age of the bride or the age of the groom? That is to say, would you oppose the marriage of a 16-year-old under any circumstances, or only if her husband was so much older? And is a 35-year age difference between bride and groom always objectionable? Would it be OK if a 25-year-old married a 60-year-old?
Several weeks of Potemkin “bipartisanship” go down the drain as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats refused to agree to any debt-ceiling deal that didn’t include tax increases. Jon Kyl has not yet issued a statement, but Eric Cantor explains his exit:
[A]s it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the President to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue.
Let me explain what’s actually happening here: John Boehner and the GOP call the shots in the House — where it’s straight majority rule — but neither party can exercise such unilateral power in the Senate, where Democrats don’t have a veto-proof majority. Therefore, the White House would normally be expected to act as broker for a deal acceptable to both parties in Congress. However . . .
Obama’s gearing up his 2012 re-election campaign, and is therefore trying to paint Republicans into a box, to depict them as “extremist” and “irresponsible” if they don’t compromise with Democrats on a deal to increase the debt ceiling. And in this case, “compromise” means agreeing to a tax increase, which would be a 100% betrayal of the voters who gave Republicans the majority in last year’s mid-term election.
In other words, it’s a variation of the tactic by which Democrats in 1990 forced George H.W. Bush to agree to a tax increase, breaking his “no new taxes” pledge. And if Republicans let themselves be bamboozled that way now, they deserve to be defeated in 2012.
The GOP’s mockery “trivialized Obama and Obama is not a trivial person,” Gingrich said in an exclusive interview with Vadum featured in the book:
In [Gingrich’s] opinion it was a strategic blunder for Palin and Giuliani . . . [Gingrich said:] “Obama is the most serious radical threat to traditional America ever to occupy the White House.” It would have been better if Republican leaders “had gotten up and said, here is what [Obama] was teaching, and they had taken the audience through the five principles of [radical organizer Saul] Alinsky.” Such a discussion “would have sobered the country. It wasn’t a funny thing. It was a profound insight into how radical Obama is.”
My reaction on Twitter last night was brief and blunt. It is astounding that they’d do this and I’d rather ignore it altogether, but now the desperate and ridiculous gay smear against Rick Perry has been promoted at both Politicoand New York magazine.
Isn’t it interesting how so many high-minded journalists who sneered at the Anthony Weiner scandal as an absurd “distraction” from the real issues — an attitude that just coincidentally reprised Weiner’s original defense against accusations that later proved entirely true — are now willing to lend credence to mere rumors which are not only unsubstantiated but also highly implausible? There isn’t any reason at all to believe this smear, so why was it necessary to recycle it?
I’m not a particular admirer of Perry and, so far as talk of his entering the GOP 2012 field is concerned, my gut hunch is that voters probably won’t be eager next year to put another Republican governor Texas in the White House. Been there, done that, OK?
Yet we see that as soon as talk of a Perry ’12 presidential campaign got reasonably serious, the liberal media went hunting for the very lowest dirt peddled by left-wing bloggers in Texas.
Once again it is demonstrated that, if it weren’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.
I trust commenters will alert us when Charles Johnson tries to rationalize this latest defeat for his “Eurofascist” smear campaign.
UPDATE: Could he possibly be more predictable?
Let’s pause first to ask whether anyone did more in the way “inciting hatred” than did Charles Johnson 1.0, back in the day when LGF was foremost among “the right-wing ‘anti-jihad’ loons.” It was only after he conceived a grudge against Pamela Geller (for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels “Counter Jihad” conference) that Johnson sought to assert his authority among conservative bloggers to issue fatwas against Geller, Robert Spencer and others.
By the time Johnson denounced Geller as a “Poster Girl for Eurofascists” in April 2009, he had already spent some 18 months waging a one-man crusade to purge others (including Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity) from the ranks of “acceptable” conservative voices. And it was only because his attempted purge failed that Johnson then flipped and began positioning himself as an opponent of conservatives who had once been his only supporters. He has never been able to articulate any coherent political rationale for his conversion to the Left, and we can only conclude that his motives were selfish, spiteful and petty.
This is significant for a couple of reasons. Just three months earlier, CJ had begun attacking Geller over her association with European anti-jihadists. Yet he was still referring to Islam with the phrase “Religion of Peace™” — i.e., signifying as a conservative supporter of the Global War on Terror — and did not yet identify Wilders as a villainous “hatemonger.”
In early 2008, then, Johnson still identified with the Right, but was trying to push Geller and Spencer out. As I say, it was the failure of that purge — the frustration of his attempt to play arbiter of membership in the conservative blogsophere — that caused him to “part ways” with the Right.
Frankly, I’m bored with Obama by now, so why blog about his speech, except that he interrupted primetime TV to make it? From the transcript:
In the days that followed [the 9/11 attacks], our nation was united as we struck at al-Qaida and routed the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, our focus shifted. A second war was launched in Iraq, and we spent enormous blood and treasure to support a new government there. By the time I took office, the war in Afghanistan had entered its seventh year. But al-Qaida’s leaders had escaped into Pakistan and were plotting new attacks, while the Taliban had regrouped and gone on the offensive. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent al-Qaida, and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan.
For this reason, in one of the most difficult decisions that I’ve made as president, I ordered an additional 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan.
Why, in 2011, does Obama insist on repeating this stale and misleading Democrat talking-point from 2004?
Al-Qaeda’s escape from Tora Bora in December 2001 did not happen because “our focus shifted,” and Gen. Tommy Franks has said that, as far as we know, Osama bin Laden may have already fled to Pakistan before the battle of Tora Bora even started. Either way, insofar as the U.S. military’s mission in Afghanistan was to kill or capture bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders, the chance for fulfilling that mission was gone by January 2002.
Operation Iraqi Freedom did not begin until March 2003, so that the propopaganda claim embedded in the Democrat talking-point — i.e., the Iraq war being a “distraction” from the anti-terrorism campaign against al-Qaeda — was always essentially a lie. Continue reading Obama’s Afghanistan Speech →
