Category: Lisa Graas

Lisa Graas Needs Help, Y’all

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Lisa Graas (right) and her daughters with Rick Santorum

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO LISA GRAAS

Lisa Graas has been diagnosed with cancer, and it’s very serious.

Longtime readers will recognize Lisa from 10 years ago when she was a leading online supporter of Sen. Rick Santorum’s primary campaign for the Republican nomination. When I was covering the Louisiana primary, and got busted in the notorious speed trap town of Livonia — they towed my rental car! — it was Lisa who drove all the way down from Kentucky to Louisiana to bring me back home. This also enabled her to be at the Santorum victory party in Harahan.

Lisa is a devout Catholic who is still blogging at Pierced Hearts which has a page with various ways you can contribute to support her. Lisa’s diagnosis sounds very serious and her chemo treatments will cost $10,000-$20,000 per month, some of which should be covered by insurance, but still this is an ordeal for her. Lisa helped me in my hour of need, so everything y’all could do for her would be greatly appreciated.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO LISA GRAAS

UPDATE: Lisa informs me that you guys contributed more than $1,500, for which she is very grateful. I’ll leave this post stickied to the top of the page until Tuesday morning, just in case anyone previously overlooked it.

 

Still Crazy, After All These Years

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The loony bin, the funny farm, the nuthouse — it is not politically correct to refer to therapeutic institutions in such slang terminology, but this PC attitude of apologetic sensitivity toward the mentally ill doesn’t really help anyone, least of all the kooks themselves. If someone is dealing with clinical depression or paranoid schizophrenia, insensitive slang isn’t their biggest problem. It’s not even in the Top Ten.

Maybe you won’t take my word for it — hey, what do I know about being crazy? — but I’d urge you to heed my friend Lisa Graas:

Msgr. Charles Pope has written a personal story about mental illness that I recommend. He offers that people die from mental illness every day. His sister was among them. I have nearly been counted among them multiple times, having been put behind locked doors for my own safety. Mental illness runs in my family, and so, I am not the only person in my family who has spent time behind those locked doors. As Msgr. Pope points out, not enough people are behind locked doors for their own safety because too many people believe mental hospitals are “inhumane” ways to deal with the mentally ill. In reality, it is inhumane not to confine people who are a danger to themselves or to others.

Read the Monsignor’s story, and when you’re finished with that, go hit Lisa’s tip jar — every time someone hits her tip jar, an angel gets his wings.

 

God Bless Lisa Graas

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by Smitty

God bless Lisa Graas. Go read all of the Catholic Bandita’s Ten Things [She] Learned About Stacy McCain:

3.) He’s liable to shout, in a crowded restaurant, “WTF?!?!?” if (actually “when”) Carl Cameron breaks into a Santorum speech and steals his thunder (intentionally?), and he is liable to shout in a manner loud enough so that he can be heard by everyone in the (very large) building over loud music and five televisions that are playing at the same time. Also, fist-waving, albeit subtly (if fist-waving can be subtle) may be seen.
2.) He actually interviews people, but only at political venues. He’s not too keen on polling waitresses and customers at the Waffle House, unlike me and Peter. Incidentally, at the Waffle House in a Tennessee town where we stopped, there was one Obama supporter, one Romney supporter, one Paul supporter and one Santorum supporter.
*I ordered and enjoyed a big bowl of grits.

Read the whole thing. I also agree with Lisa in her post that Mrs. The Other McCain is a saint.

Whenever I signed on with Stacy, I guess it was after CPAC ’09? I remarked “You remind me of someone with whom I got into a lot of trouble.” Somewhere in the middle of his irreverent character is something fundamentally American. The major reason I, and, probably, the rest of the fan club, abet him is that we understand we lose that fundamentally American aspect at our peril.

Find your inner Stacy McCain or Lisa Graas, as the case may be, and let’s be about recovering the country.

Lisa Graas: Santorum’s Secret Weapon

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Louisiana Santorum volunteer David with Lisa Graas in Central, La., March 24, 2012

CENTRAL, Louisiana
Mitt Romney’s got the big money and the big endorsements, but Rick Santorum has Lisa Graas who — with 6,835 Twitter followers and about 1,500 Facebook friends — has been a sort of social-media equalizer, helping lead an amazingly effective online grassroots campaign for her candidate. It was Lisa who urged me to cover Santorum’s campaign in Iowa back in August, when he was stuck in single digits in the polls and the media were ignoring him. When I showed up that Saturday in Roland, Iowa, at a barn in the middle of a cornfield, I called Lisa and handed my phone to the senator, who talked to her for more than 10 minutes — and that impressed me.

Rick Santorum talks to Lisa Graas in Roland, Iowa, Aug. 6, 2011

Ask anyone in politics: Nothing is more valuable to a campaign than the candidate’s time. The fact that Santorum was willing to spend 10 minutes on the phone with this Catholic blogger mom from Kentucky was an indicator that he understood the value of her online activism.

Lisa was 100% for Santorum at a time when almost no one believed he had a chance in Iowa — or anywhere else, for that matter.

Santorum understood the value of that kind of volunteer enthusiasm and he understood that encouraging volunteers like Lisa, at a time when there seemed to be so little cause for optimism, was an important part of his campaign. Continue reading Lisa Graas: Santorum’s Secret Weapon →

Santorum: The ‘Least Worst’ Candidate?

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Lisa Graas makes an interesting argument about the way voters are manipulated with news about polling. Read the headline and first two paragraph of a NewsMax article Monday:

Rasmussen Poll: Gingrich, Romney
Strongest to Beat Obama
Voters are evenly divided over whether Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney would provide President Barack Obama with the strongest GOP challenge next November, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll.
But twice as many Republican voters feel that the former House speaker would have a better chance of beating Obama in the race for the White House. . . .

My own criticism of such a story is this: It is absurd to allow your vote in a primary to be influenced by poll data about “electability” in surveys conducted many months in advance of the election. Such polls will almost always favor the candidate with the biggest “name ID” and, in this year’s Flavor-of-the-Month GOP campaign, we’ve seen front-runners rise and fall. For a few weeks in late August and early September, Rick Perry’s numbers were very encouraging and now — as the Iowa caucuses approach — Perry looks like an also-ran.

Campaigns matter. Hypothetical poll match-ups between candidates cannot predict the events of a campaign, and those unforeseen events will ultimately matter more than the shallow perceptions reflected in polls done in advance of an actual campaign.

That’s my general criticism of reporting polls as facts, as if today’s barometer of public opinion reflected a solid and permanent reality.

Lisa Graas, however, finds something surprising buried deep in that NewsMax article:

Voters were also asked which of the seven leading GOP candidates would do worst against Obama. In that poll, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann was considered the weakest candidate by 30 percent of respondents, scoring more than double over the next-worst, Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Women gave Bachmann, the only female in the race, an even lower rating than men did. Romney at 4 percent and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum at 7 percent were considered the least-worst candidates.

Of course, Lisa has other arguments in favor of Santorum, but it is interesting to discover — in the seventh paragraph of this article — that Santorum’s low-budget candidacy rivals a big-money contender like Romney in what might be a crucial factor for those GOP voters who place a premium on “electability.”

A Mom Named Stacy

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Names are curious things. Sometimes I have to explain what should be obvious, that the name of this blog is “The Other McCain” because I did not support my distant cousin John’s candidacy in the 2008 GOP primary campaign. (Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr!) And when people ask, “Should I call you Bob? Rob? What?” I explain that I’ve always been Stacy McCain, but learned early in my journalism career to use my full name as my byline, because otherwise newspaper readers would call the office and ask to speak to her.

This kind of “Boy Named Sue” situation is something I’ve lived with since childhood — “My fists got hard and my wits got keen,” as the Man in Black said — and so I’ve learned to shrug off such things as the 2003 Fountains of Wayne song, “Stacy’s Mom.” Which brings us, by a roundabout route, to my friend Lisa Graas and her friend whom we’ll have to call The Other Stacy.

Stacy Trasancos is a married mother of seven who lives in Worcester, Massachusetts. A twice-divorced former Texas Baptist, she converted to Catholicism, quit her job as a research chemist and became a full-time mom and homemaker. She blogs at Accepting Abundance.

You may well wonder why Mrs. Trasancos would be targeted by trolls who leave comments like this:

The answer to that mystery — but it’s really no mystery, is it? — is that Mrs. Trasancos wrote something that offended the Left, which responded with the Civility™ for which the Left is so famous. Her offense was to write an Aug. 26 post called “Can’t Even Go to the Park,” which described her reaction to everyday circumstances of public life in the Bay Gay State:

The same people who say I shouldn’t impose my morality on them, are imposing immorality on me and my children to the point that I literally have a hard time even leaving my home anymore to do something as simple as visit the park. And this is freedom?

Within a matter of hours, Mrs. Trasancos’s maternal complaint had drawn the attention of those Advocates of Tolerance whose common parlance is obscene epithet-laden expressions of misogynystic hatred, otherwise known as The Gay Community. My friend Lisa Graas urged her fellow Catholics to support Mrs. Trasancos against “the tactics of the ‘gay rights’ movement against people of faith,” but Lisa is wrong about one thing: Hate isn’t merely their “tactic.” Continue reading A Mom Named Stacy →

Rick Santorum’s Iowa Barn Party

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ROLAND, Iowa
Rick Santorum just finished doing a “barn party” here at the home of Scott and Susan Hurd. While I have no firm estimate of how many eligible voters were in attendance, I can state officially that the number of kids was ginormous. Lots of big home-schooling families showed up — families with seven, eight, nine kids. Santorum is traveling with his own family of seven kids, so the super-size families certainly seem simpatico with the former Pennsylvania senator.

Also in attendance was local Republican Rep. Steve King, who introduced Santorum. The candidate spoke for nearly a half-hour and then took questions. I’ve got video, audio and notes, but that will take time to process, and I’m blogging this from a McDonald’s beside the I-35 exit and just want to get up a quick post with a few photos. Santorum noted that he has visited some 51 different cities in Iowa, with more than 100 stops. He spoke about the need to repeal ObamaCare and – in response to a question about foreign policy – gave a splendid account of Obama’s failures, going into some detail about Honduras. (How many candidates have you heard talk about Honduras? How many of people even know how Obama screwed over Honduras?) He was quite impressive, and I very much agree with Santorum’s complaint that the media has unfairly ignored his candidacy.

Santorum and his wife Karen talk with supporters. You can see Rep. King in the background.

Santorum talks on the phone with Lisa Graas, his No. 1 Twitter supporter, who was positively ecstatic about the chance to talk to her hero — on my cell phone.

Karen Santorum with her two oldest daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth. Right after I took this photo, Santorum’s press aide told me that the family are “off limits” to the media. But, of course, I’m just a friend of Lisa Graas, right? It’s not fair to treat me as “media.”

OK, so that’s it for now. I’ll have more later, but I’ve got to hit the road to Sioux City tonight. And you’ve got to hit the tip jar.

Religious Left Infiltrates Catholic Agency?

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Lisa Graas reports:

According to a document revealed by Creative Minority Report (CMR), we now have definitive proof that the pro-abortion mindset dwells even at the highest levels of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The document is a public campaign finance report for Planned Parenthood-endorsed pro-abortion candidate Wendy Davis listing Ralph McCloud as campaign treasurer during his first year as the Director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).

Davis is a Democrat who won a Texas state senate seat, previously held by a Republican, in the suburbs of Fort Worth during the Obama “wave” of 2008. So why would the USCCB appoint a pro-abortion politician’s campaign treasurer as head of a major Catholic agency?

Does the name George Soros ring a bell? Since 2005, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good:

John Podesta, who runs the Soros-funded organization, Center for American Progress, admits that he works closely with Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United.

This Soros-backed effort has been exposed in a documentary called Obama’s Counterfeit Catholics:




Michael Voris has compiled extensive documentation about this Soros-backed project. Like the oxymoronically named “Catholics for Choice,” the purpose of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is to convey a simple message to ignorant people: “God wants you to vote Democrat.”

Learn more about the Religious Left.