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.”
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.
At least one reader has complained that it’s time to move on from WeinerGate, and I’m entirely willing to do so — but the dadgum story won’t stop, and stuff just keeps popping up.
This “Betty and Veronica” mystery continues bubbling. The person whom Tommy Christopher dubbed “Betty” was “Nikki Reid” a/k/a “Starchild111,” an alleged teenage girl who was one of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter correspondents. But no one can now verify her existence, and a New York Times report suggests that Nikki/Starchild was in fact some sort of sockpuppet honey-trap conjured up by Weiner’s enemies:
I’m just throwing this stuff out there, because now that the story is past the point of purely political interest — nobody’s partisan ox is going to be gored by further WeinerGate developments — it would be rather irresponsible to ignore the remaining loose threads.
Meanwhile, I will have no comment on the former Hillary Clinton intern who how has a new line of work. While I’m sure that some readers will be eager to research the young woman’s career in . . . er, the adult entertainment industry, I repeat that I have no comment.
I was up to my neck in Right Online at the time, and so didn’t get around to blogging about it Friday, but to those of us who followed WeinerGate in-depth from Day One, this is one of those dangling loose threads — along with “PatriotUSA76″/”Dan Wolfe”/#bornfreecrew — that inspires continued fascination.
The bottom line? Don’t assume that people whom you know only through the Internet are who they really say they are, nor should you assume that people who profess to be “on your side” actually are.
MINNEAPOLIS — About 15 bloggers got a rare glimpse at an angry Herman Cain, when the Republican presidential candidate’s temper flared briefly during an informal press conference Saturday.
“If you’re trying to make me lose my cool, you’re almost succeeding,” Cain said, after McMorris-Santoro raised the question — one Cain had addressed at some length to begin the press conference — and when the TMP writer attempted to reiterate the question, Cain roared back: “I never said I would use any special precautions!”
KEYES: You came under a bit of controversy this week for some of the comments made about Muslims in general. Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim, either in your cabinet or as a federal judge?
CAIN: No, I will not. And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there is this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government. This is what happened in Europe. And little by little, to try and be politically correct, they made this little change, they made this little change. And now they’ve got a social problem that they don’t know what to do with hardly.
The question that was asked that “raised some questions” and, as my grandfather said, “I does not care, I feel the way I feel.” I was asked, “what is the role of Islam in America?” I thought it was an odd question. I said the role of Islam in America is for those that believe in Islam to practice it and leave us alone. Just like Christianity. We have a First Amendment. And I get upset when the Muslims in this country, some of them, try to force their Sharia law onto the rest of us.
The question about Muslims was one of three points that Cain sought to clarify in his remarks at the beginning of his press conference. He also explained why he had been unwilling to sign a pledge offered by a pro-life group, saying that he is strongly pro-life, but had issues with the wording of the pledge; and he repeated his strong support for gun rights, which had been questioned by some Second Amendment activists. Taking questions from bloggers, Cain also discussed his disagreements with another 2012 GOP candidate, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, about the Federal Reserve system.
The press conference — with the candidate in shirtsleeves, sitting on a chair turned backward — followed Cain’s well-received speech at the fourth annual Right Online conference, hosted by Americans for Prosperity.
America is suffering “a severe deficiency of leaderships,” Cain said during the speech, which was interrupted several times by standing ovations.
“Small businesses . . . are hanging on for dear life,” Cain told the RightOnline crowd, assuring those struggling with the current recession: “Hold on . . . help is on the way.”
MINNEAPOLIS Everybody I saw downstairs this morning at the Right Online conference kept telling me, “You look rough.” As well I should.
My flight out of Dulles yesterday was delayed more than an hour on departure. By the time I arrived, checked into the Hilton and had dinner — bangers and mash at a British-style pub downtown — I was running desperately late on deadline for my column at The American Spectator:
Three weeks ago, Anthony Weiner was a rising star in the Democratic Party, an influential spokesman for the progressive movement and, quite possibly, the next mayor of New York City.
Today, Weiner is a despised figure so thoroughly disgraced, even in the eyes of the most partisan Democrats, that he is unlikely to have any future in politics. In the process of stringing out his bizarre scandal for nearly three weeks — the first 10 days of which were spent telling one implausible lie after another — Weiner damaged himself and his party in a way that would not have happened had he resigned much sooner. By the time Weiner gave his resignation speech Thursday in New York, he was such a pariah that even his political mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer, would not even speak publicly in his defense, instead issuing a brief statement wishing Weiner well. . . .
Please read the whole thing. After I hit deadline, I managed to grab Andrew Breitbart in the hotel lobby for this 4-minute interview about his role in breaking the WeinerGate scandal:
You’ll notice Breitbart had a bottle of red wine handy, and kept waving the cork when he was gesturing. This interview took place at about 2 a.m., after the lobby bar had closed.
DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT By the time you read this, I’ll be on board a jet preparing to depart for Minneapolis and the 2011 Right Online conference. I’m still recovering (and by “recovering,” I mean sick as hell) from pneumonia, and the strain of Three Weeks of Weiner have probably hindered my recovery.
Both Don Surber and Da Tech Guy called attention to the timeline of my posts I appended to today’s post about Anthony Weiner’s resignation. All credit is due to Andrew Breitbart, as well as to Ace of Spades, Patterico and many other bloggers who helped push this story to its final resolution. If you’ll look at that timeline, you’ll see that I did 15 posts in the first five days of the scandal (May 28-June 1), so I think I contributed my fair share to the team effort.
Remember that, in his first public statements about the scandal, Anthony Weiner urged reporters to “move on.”
Yeah. And now, you see, I’m movin’ on from town to town.
Representative Anthony D. Weiner has told friends that he plans to resign his seat after coming under growing pressure from his Democratic colleagues to leave the House in the wake of revelations of his lewd online exchanges with women, said a person told of Mr. Weiner’s plans.
NBC News confirms that Weiner called Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Steve Israel last night to inform them he had decided to resign on Thursday.
For the first 10 days, Weiner lied, lied, lied, and the liberals who believed Weiner were wrong, wrong, wrong, while conservatives were right, right, right. In the past 10 days, since Weiner’s June 6 press conference, liberals have tried to forget that their credulity in believing Weiner’s lies, and the idiotic conspiracy theories they proffered in his defense.
Now is the day when Jeffrey Toobin, Joan Walsh and a lot of other liberals must be called to account.
Nancy Pelosi is about to have a press conference in D.C.
UPDATE V: All Pelosi had to say at the press conference was that she was not going to comment on Weiner. And then . . . let’s talk about the real issues! Blah, blah, blah.
Weiner will hold at 2 p.m. ET press conference today, but I’ll have to miss that. I’ll be on my way to the airport to catch my flight to Minneapolis to attend the Right Online conference, where I’ll be hanging out with Andrew Breitbart, Herman Cain, Michelle Malkin and many more.
