Mr. Santorum issued a statement that said, in part, “As the son of an Italian immigrant myself, I continue to believe that English is the language of opportunity in America under statehood or the current status.”
Mr. Neumann said that despite Mr. Romney’s having the backing of establishment Republicans in Puerto Rico, Mr. Santorum still had a good chance here “because of his connection with the religious sector of the community.” Mr. Santorum is Roman Catholic, as are an overwhelming majority of people in Puerto Rico.
Being in favor of English is not the same as being anti-Spanish. My daughter, who is fluent in Spanish — her husband is the son of Argentine immigrants, and she spent a year in a full-immersion Spanish language program in Argentina — teaches kindergarten in a school here in Maryland where about three-quarters of her students are the children of Hispanic immigrants who don’t speak English at home. You know what? Those kids’ parents are so happy that my daughter teaches those kids English. It is indeed “the language of opportunity,” and everybody knows it, and it shouldn’t be “controversial” for a politician to say so.
Thursday evening at the Chariton County caucus inside the Railyard Steakhouse . . . Republicans voted to send their full share of delegates to the district and state conventions in support of Rick Santorum. For weeks, the Romney campaign has forcefully argued that Mr. Santorum’s victory in the Missouri primary last month was meaningless because no delegates were awarded. That assertion may turn out to be only partly true, which became clear for the first time here at the caucus meeting. . . .
An early glimpse into the caucuses unfolded here in Brunswick, a small town about two hours east of Kansas City, which decided to hold its meeting two days before the rest of the state.
The first question of the evening was whether to bind delegates to the results of the February primary. The measure passed by a wide margin and no discussion, which sent four delegates on behalf of Mr. Santorum and none for Mr. Romney or Representative Ron Paul of Texas.
“All of our county delegates will be bound to the popular vote for Chariton County,” said Andrea Rice, the county Republican chairwoman, who presided over the meeting and announced the results. “Four delegates will go for Rick Santorum.”
See what I’m talking about? Yes, officially, the Missouri primary was “non-binding,” but there was never any logic to the Romney spin. They wanted us to believe that Republicans attending a caucus in a county where Santorum previously got 60 or 70 percent of the primary vote would then turn around and award a majority of delegates to Romney. And considering that Santorum got 55% of the vote to 25% for Romney in the primary, this kind of caucus-flipping skullduggery would have to occur in county after county in order for Romney to swindle Santorum out of any significant number of delegates.
That’s just crazy talk, yet we heard that spin repeated endlessly on TV, and have seen it everywhere on the blogosphere. “Non-binding” became one of those things people said to show how sophisticated they were, as if anyone who counted Missouri a solid win for Santorum was a dimwit yokel, but Santorum won Missouri by THIRTY FREAKING POINTS!
I have been doing research and have learned that many doctors who specialize in treatment of Late Stage Lyme operate on a cash only business to avoid some of the nasty red tape and big nanny state f–kery which becomes a barrier to the doctors ability to do right by his or her patients. And they don’t come cheap — one doctor I called requires a $1500 payment JUST for the initial consult, and requires a five hundred dollar security deposit just to be able to make the appointment! It is obvious that he is not a doctor I can afford to see but I am hoping I can find one who can see me and is willing to treat me without costing a ton of money. I am learning that people with this late stage Lyme have to pay a LOT of money for testing and treatment. Any money I can scrape together towards my health issues is going to be money that would otherwise be used to pay for food and our utility bills here, so I could really use some help. You will be helping to save my life and give back to my family the mom & wife that they deserve.
As someone who’s enjoyed robust health, I can only imagine what this sort of chronic illness must be like.
Just getting down to a valid diagnosis is worthwhile. Also worthwhile: seeing Americans help themselves without the government slipping on the velvet handcuffs.
Also worthy of your consideration: Da Tech Guy, the founder of the Axis of Fedora and, if I may embarrass him, one of the most beautiful Christian men I’ve had the privilege of calling friend. Pete’s situation is less life-threatening health-wise than Zilla’s. Yet Pete has surmounted different, also daunting challenges.
In a day and age where too many people are punting on traditional American values and, instead, looking for a taxpayer bailout, it is a blessing to know and support people like Zilla and Pete.
Please remember them in your prayers and do what else is within your means to help them.
So says Joe Kennedy III in a campaign video, opting to run for the seat vacated by the unlamented Barney Frank.
It may be that the Kennedy brand has recovered from the passing of Ted. According to the Boston Herald:
The UMass Lowell/Herald poll — the first to test the younger Kennedy’s appeal in the newly configured 4th Congressional District — shows no evidence of “Kennedy fatigue.” More than two years after the death of U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, nearly three quarters of voters in the district have a favorable opinion of the Kennedy family — including 42 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.
The survey of 408 registered voters in the district was conducted from Feb. 2-4 and Feb. 6-8 and has margin of error of 6.4 percent.
Or not. The resemblance between Joe Kennedy and Lance Burri cannot be denied:
In an e-mail to some friends this afternoon, I wrote:
While I was working on other posts and not following Twitter, it seems my feed blew up with ‘H8Rs’ who either missed the point or else got the point, and decided to blow me up for having pointed out some obvious but uncomfortable truths about New Media.
The issue here is not whether I am rude or sexist — I am occasionally both — but rather whether there is a polite way in which media exploits what is pejoratively called “sexism.” My willingness to engage in self-revelation, and self-deprecation, exposes me to abuse and ridicule from certain people who are more concerned about image maintenance and reputation enhancement than in, y’know, truth.
But these problems are my own, and I will not project blame onto others for reacting to my own deliberately provocative remarks. However, I wish to hell some people would have more consideration for how my remarks are themselves but a reaction to other provocative stimuli.
[Insert wry reference to Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch]
Not playing the victim here or anything, you understand. If I write something ambiguous, and am misunderstood, this is nobody’s fault but mine, and I am not entitled to attribute malice to my critics. However, permit me to retrace the chain of causality, just in case anyone wasn’t paying attention the first time:
Patrick at “Thoughts and Rantings” criticizes Tina Korbe for wearing a short skirt in a CPAC interview with Rick Santorum.
I compose a 2,000-word response to Patrick, in which I attempt to demonstrate that I am sympathetic to his plight, having myself experienced the consequences of my own impulsive temperament.
It appears that my post was seen by some as a personal attack on Tina Korbe, despite my explicit denial of any animus toward her, and despite my attempt to cushion any criticism with self-deprecating humor. As I say, I’m not blaming others for misunderstanding a long and convoluted essay which, quite obviously, was easy to misunderstand.
Perhaps it is arrogant to believe that my good intentions would be apparent to my friends, and still more arrogant to suppose that any error or offense would be indulged on account of friendship. But it is at times like this that you learn who your real friends are.
UPDATE: Did I say “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”? Cue the Zep:
Had a nice phone conversation with Pete Da Tech Guy, who pointed out that there are some people who don’t seem to mind Whitney Houston dying nearly as much as they mind people being “judgmental” about her drug abuse. Interpret that how you will.
The entire point of the post was that Patrick at “Thoughts and Rantings” had implied that his criticism of Tina’s skirt had prompted Melissa’s lecture on dress and decorum. Patrick linked me, and I saw his post because of the trackback. While I was thinking about doing a follow-up post to link back to Patrick, he blew up and called me a “f–king coward,” recalling an old grudge.
OK, so I wanted to show Patrick that I wasn’t holding grudges, and in doing so, (a) I pushed back against his over-the-top criticism of Tina Korbe; (b) recounted my own history of over-the-top criticism in a related example; and (c) concluded by advising Patrick that he should not be so quick to condemn others for their reactions to his deliberate provocations.
Did I argue this in linear form or compose the post in such a way that my purpose was entirely clear? No.
Is there an obvious danger in writing the way I write? Yes.
Are people prone to sympathize with someone they think has attacked their friend? No.
Do I know who my friends are? Yes. Oh, yes indeed, I do.
UPDATE III: Jenny Erikson is amazed by the uproar, as am I. There has been a lot of crazy on the blogosphere today that had nothing to do with me and, discussing it with Jimmie Bise Jr. this afternoon, we reached an agreement that a lot of conservatives are feeling frustrated lately. They are disappointed in the presidential field; their favorite candidate either dropped out long ago or is currently in third place. And there was also some disgruntlement over CPAC this year. Ergo, people are happy to have someone to lash out at.
So I was doing a post about human nature, specifically about someone (Patrick) who had lashed out at Tina Korbe and then lashed out at me, and beneath the video that started it, here is what I wrote:
Our keen-eyed readers will note that at the 0:28 mark of the video, Miss Korbe gives a little tug at the hem of her skirt and, not to get all Melissa Clouthier about it or anything, some folks might say that’s kind of a telltale clue that your skirt’s too doggone short.
Notice the carom-shot: I said I didn’t want “to get all Melissa Clouthier about it” — nudging her for her post specifying what she considered an appropriate dress code for CPAC — before saying that “some folks might say” the skirt was nonetheless “too doggone short.”
Did you catch the downhome informality of those phrases? Did that register to readers in terms of tone? Because having been accused of “attacking” Miss Korbe, it occurs to me that the jocular tone must not have registered.
Now, to let you in on a little secret: I knew for a fact, before I wrote the post, that Melissa’s criticism wasn’t directed at Miss Korbe, because I called our mutual friend Ali Akbar to check first. But Patrick had seemed to be under the impression that his criticism of Miss Korbe was reflected by Melissa’s post, and I was replying to Patrick.
For example, I think tattoos and pierced bellybuttons are two of the tackiest things in the world, but I’m pretty sure not every woman with tattoos and a pierced bellybutton is a whore.
Most of them? Sure, but not all of them.
Similarly, short skirts and exposed cleavage do not necessarily signal that a woman is up for some action with any dude who’ll give her the price of another hit of methamphetamine. It is true that many hookers dress that way, but not every woman who dresses that way is a hooker.
That’s called hyperbole — deliberately stating an argument in an exaggerated way. And the line that followed was about “Maine College Republicans,” a running gag from a previous post I’d linked. And then I got into what prompted the whole thing:
Anyway, my responsible-but-not-judgmental post was linked in a roundup on the CPAC decorum controversy at “Thoughts and Ramblings,” whose proprietor suggested that this was in response to a post he’d done earlier, in which he said, “Tina, you are a Catholic, try actually dressing like one,” and accused her of giving the Senator “a peep show of her hoo haa.”
That went too far, I’d say. It was judgmental to the point of being irresponsible. And while I didn’t realize it when I saw the link yesterday, the proprietor of that blog has kind of a history here, of which he has since reminded me.
OK, when I linked the post that prompted my reply, I expected that people will click through the link and see what I was talking about. But evidently many people didn’t do that, and thus overlooked the nature of the provocation — being accused of having thrown Patrick “under the bus,” etc.
The reason I’ve added this sort of un-fisking of my own post is because I am being accused of attacking someone I had thought I’d made clear I was actually attempting to defend. But this obviously wasn’t as clear to others as it was to me, and so I appeared to be “beating up a girl,” and everything escalated from there.
I’ve since talked to Melissa Clouthier about this, and she was concerned about the “impression” I had created, intentionally or otherwise, and felt that I was insufficiently concerned about it and I suppose she’s right. The problem, I guess, is that almost no one ever shows any deference toward me or concern about my feelings — many people never miss a chance to insult or snub me — and therefore I’m surprised when my occasional breaches of decorum are treated as inexcusable.
Da Tech Guy wonders why the race card went unplayed in the case of Herman Cain.
If you flip it over, the Race Card says “Property of the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party”.
Conservatives, therefore, cannot play the card.
If conservatives try to play the card, cast as, say, a ‘hi tech lynching‘, they quickly get shouted down.
If the conservative under attack is rich, he is assumed guilty anyway: calls for, you know, trial by jury, facing accusers, and innocence until proven guilty merely underscore the evil of the rich conservative. Those are Constitutional notions. Besides, as the Central Scrutinizer noted, the Constitution is being modified in order to accomodate the future. Or at least Ezra Klein.
I’ve already contributed — Pete generously acted as my chauffeur during part of the New Hampshire trip, in addition to all his excellent blogging — and I therefore urge all my readers to do likewise.
The feminists will never forgive Pete for this, of course.
It is my experience that feminists, when angry, revert to predictable arguments about the ignorance and prejudice of their critics. Yet when I recommend to them books written by women critical of the feminist belief system, these supposedly knowledgeable and open-minded women can never be bothered to read the books I recommend.
No feminist can ever concede that any critic could have a valid argument. Thus the starting point of the debate is that there can be no debate: The anti-feminist critic is simply presumed wrong, and all that needs be explained is why the critic is wrong. The Soviet “show trials” of the 1930s were less predictable than the arguments of feminists.
If ever feminists permitted doubt to penetrate their ironclad worldview, the whole ridiculous egalitarian house of cards would instantly collapse, and they would be left without an ideology to justify their folly. They should therefore be hated less than they are pitied.
UPDATE: It is unfortunate that some of my conservative friends, including Dan Collins (in the comments below) and Sissy Willis on Twitter, insist on attempting to rescue the term “feminism” from its deserved opprobrium. Here we return to Little Miss Attila’s frantic efforts to define a conservative feminism — an oxymoron — and above all I regret that, having wasted part of my day taking notice of Maureen Dowd, I must now briefly reiterate an argument that all honest and intelligent people would concede I had already decisively won.
The originators and leading advocates of feminism have always seen themselves, and properly so, as part of the Progressive Left. Feminists have therefore contested any and all attempts by conservatives to co-opt and redefine the term “feminism” as something compatible with conservatism. Yet there are many soi-disant conservatives who, desirous of seeming fashionably modern and perhaps insufficiently knowledgeable of feminism’s leftist origins, persist in claiming that conservatives who reject feminism — as all actual conservative do — are guilty of throwing out the good feminist baby with the bad feminist bathwater. (Of course, true feminists would insist that the baby must be aborted, lest womyn be compelled to submit to the institution of partiarchal oppression known as “motherhood.”)
Conservatives who defend feminism are not merely wasting their own time, but wasting the time of those of us who are required to leave aside useful work in order to refute their misguided arguments. It’s as if free-market economists should be compelled to waste their time arguing with conservatives who claim that Keynesianism is not entirely bad. And I am weary of trying to talk sense to these peddlers of “conservative feminism” nonsense. My first extended iteration of this argument was in a November 2008 column about the hateful fury of gay-rights activists that accompanied the Proposition 8 controversy in California:
The gay rage in California can be traced directly to the Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texasdecision, which voided a Texas sodomy law because, as Justice Anthony Kennedy declared, “our laws and traditions in the past half century…show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.”
The Lawrence ruling was the culmination of what Justice Antonin Scalia called “a 17-year crusade” to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision (which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy statute) and, as Scalia noted in his dissent, the Court’s “emerging awareness” argument was a disingenuous way to avoid actually declaring a “fundamental right” to sodomy. The legal effect was the same, however, and Lawrence was repeatedly cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision five months later mandating the legalization of gay marriage in that state.
If homosexuality is a right, and denying legal recognition to same-sex marriage is a violation of that right, then the rage of gay activists against their opponents is entirely justified. Proposition 8 does not deny tolerance, safety and freedom to gays and lesbians, whose right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is as secure in California as anywhere in the world.
Tolerance, safety and freedom are not the same as equality, however, and equality is the freight that liberals seek to smuggle into arguments via “rights talk.” Gay activists do not construe their “rights” in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to — entirely analogous to and fungible with — traditional marriage.
Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists’ indignant demand for equality.
This is what the self-declared “conservative feminists” refuse to acknowledge: Feminism has no meaning outside the context
of rights and equality. Once you begin defining the roles and relations of men and women in such terms, you have taken an irretrievable step down the slippery slope toward radical egalitarianism. The very fact that people who call themselves conservatives are incapable of recognizing what should be self-evident — that the radical conclusion of the egalitarian argument is implicit in its premises — should profoundly trouble those concerned about the future prospects of conservatism in America. In January 2009, I expanded my argument in controversy with Conor Friedersdorf:
Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.
Americans have been so rigorously indoctrinated about the sacredness of equality as a political, legal and social principle that one fears they’ve actually begun to believe that this kind of equality is possible or desirable, which is lunacy.
Men and women are different, and the differences are so obvious, intrinsic and profound that to prohibit “discrimination” between the sexes is to require people to pretend to believe in a transparent falsehood. No sane person could actually believe that men and women are equal — that is to say, fungible — in this way, and therefore the entirety of the feminist worldview is premised on a susceptibility to insanity.
MANCHESTER, N.H.
My flight arrived late at Boston’s Logan Airport, and I ought to demand a refund from AirTran because their advertised in-flight WiFi service was out of order, which no one seemed to notice until the passenger in Seat 30D — that would be me — asked the flight attendant about it. Of course, none of the crew knew how to fix the problem and my expressions of anguished desperation were met with helpless shrugs of indifference.
“Customer service” is so 20th century.
Da Tech Guy was waiting curbside at Logan, his 1999 Buick Le Sabre fueled and read for the race up I-93 to New Hampshire. The question was where in New Hampshire? Pete had the Rick Santorum schedule. There was a 1 p.m. event in Tilton, but my delayed flight made that an iffy proposition. So we resolved to wait for the 3:30 p.m. event in Concord. This gave us time to stop off here at the McDonald’s near the Manchester airport where I can attempt to do some of what I would have done if the WiFi on that AirTran flight had been functional.
“If he had endorsed Santorum, I mean, I would be like slitting my wrists on the table right now,” Meghan McCain said about her father’s endorsement of Mitt Romney.”
This is another reason why conservatives should support Rick Santorum: Because I’m sure if he gets the nomination, Senator Santorum will ban Meghan from the convention in Tampa.
In Jefferson County, in Iowa’s southeast corner, Paul won a stunning 49 percent of the vote, more than doubling next-place Santorum.
He also won there in 2008, his only first-place finish in that contest.
What gives? County seat Fairfield is home to thousands of devotees of the Transcendental Meditation spiritual movement and site of the Maharishi University of Management, which is aligned with the movement. Followers tend to share Paul’s views opposing military intervention and the Federal Reserve, said Bob Glade, the county’s GOP co-chairman.
“They had a campaign headquarters here for the last two months, and they were pushing real, real heavy,” Glade said of the Paul campaign.
Devotees of the Maharishi’s meditation cult in . . . Iowa? Damn. I mean, damn.
William Petroski was the Des Moines Register reporter who was assigned the “second-tier” candidate that suddenly became the biggest story of the caucuses. He has an analysis today of Santorum’s prospects going forward, which includes this:
Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who endorsed Santorum in December, said he thought the former Pennsylvania senator has a chance as a national candidate, adding that his Iowa momentum should be a boon for fundraising.
Anyone who heard Santorum’s post-caucuses speech on Tuesday night would be impressed, Schultz said. Santorum told the story of how his grandfather had immigrated from Italy to work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines and how he had sacrificed to bring his family to America. “That speech really resonates with Americans,” Schultz said. “I have heard him give it many times, but the way he sequenced the elements was brilliant.”
A story on Rick Perry’s decision to stay in the race (an updated and expanded version of this post by Josh Hafner), which mentions Joe Allbaugh and Dave Carney among the crew of idiotic “strategists” responsible for running the doomstruck farce that is the Perry campaign. Evidently, Allbaugh and Carney didn’t get enough humiliation in Iowa to suit them, and are determined to utterly destroy any future political prospects for their client, the once widely-respected governor of Texas whom they’ve turned into a national laughingstock.
While Mr. Romney dominated the day-after-Iowa news coverage with his victory lap here, Mr. Santorum and his staff were slowly making the 1,400-mile journey from Des Moines in a King Air propeller plane that did not deliver them here until suppertime, too late to make a star turn on the evening news. He made a nighttime turn on Fox News and CNN and landed in time for a rally that drew hundreds
Well, it’s now 2:30. We’ll have to hurry to make it to Concord in time for Santorum’s event, and Pete’s Buick LeSabre isn’t as fast as that sweet black Mustang. Sigh. I miss it already.
