Category: Politics

My Day (and Night) in D.C.

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ROSSLYN, Virginia
Greetings from the ninth-floor office overlooking the Potomac River that is headquarters of The American Spectator. I’m working on a borrowed computer that doesn’t have a slot for the digital memory chip that contains photos and video I shot today at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Presidential Candidate Forum. So I’ll upload that tomorrow. Meantime, word pictures will have to do.

My reasons for coming down to D.C. today were fourfold:

  1. A 1 p.m. interview with Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nevada);
  2. The RJC forum;
  3. Trying to talk my bosses at the Spectator into giving me some travel expense money; and
  4. A party tonight on Capitol Hill.

So I began by renting a car. The deer-damaged KIA finally has been repaired, but I’ve still got to pay some fees to the DMV to get the tags and stuff, and I have a visceral aversion to dealing with bureaucracy. Anyway . . .

Raining cats, dogs and other small mammals in the D.C. area today. This means traffic was even worse of a mess than usual. Washington is full of people who can’t drive worth crap on a clear sunny day, and a rainstorm is an almost insuperable challenge for these incompetent vehicular menaces. The District of Columbia is the only place in America where they offer the driver’s exam in braille, and the laws against “discrimination” are so stringent in Washington that it’s considered a human-rights violation to deny a license to the mentally handicapped. 

D.C. gives licenses to people who are too stupid to figure out how to buy a bus pass, and the taxis are all driven by guys from Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the nuances of such words as “merge” and “yield” seem to have been lost in translation. At least 15% of the drivers in our nation’s capital are recently released inmates of St. Elizabeth’s. I’m pretty sure the guy who cut me off on Constitution Avenue today was John Hinckley.

Did I ever mention I hate driving in D.C.? And it’s a deeply personal hatred. Everybody here complains about “traffic,” as if it were some amorphous inevitable thing. But bad traffic is caused by bad drivers, so every trip into town is for me a non-stop cussfest against the idiots responsible for this godawful mess. Anyway . . .

So I was a half-hour late getting to the Russell Senate Office Building for my interview with Dean Heller, but they understood that this was not my fault, and the interview was wonderful. Heller is a great conservative facing a 2012 challenge from Shelley Berkeley, a corrupt liberal pawn of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis. Go give Senator Heller $25 or $50 for his re-election campaign now.

Once we’d finished the interview, I hailed a cab and went to the Ronald Reagan Center for the RJC shindig. No sooner had I signed in at the media credentials table than I encountered Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his entourage entering the auditorium. Got some pictures then went inside where Newt Gingrich was talking. And talking and talking.

Let’s face it: If you want a president who can spontaneously deliver a five-minute policy seminar on any topic under the sun, Newt’s you’re guy. Dude opens his mouth and entire paragraphs come tumbling out, each paragraph including at least one “frankly” and one “fundamentally.”

The RJC audience seemed to dig Newt’s act, but frankly, I’m fundamentally opposed to his candidacy.

Didn’t stick around to hear Perry’s speech, although I’m told his three-point plan for Middle East peace was excellent, if only he could have remembered the third point.

Of course, I missed Rick Santorum’s RJC speech this morning. Fortunately, Michael Memoli of the Los Angeles Times was there:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum said there’s good reason why he’s talking a lot more about foreign policy than other Republican candidates.
“Because I believe that there’s a very good chance that by next election day, the national security issues in this country will be of higher priority in the eyes of the American people than the economy,” he said Wednesday morning in Washington. . . .
Invoking the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the former Pennsylvania senator slammed President Obama for a policy of “appeasement” with regard to Iran that has allowed that nation to become a much bigger threat.
“I know people in this country are tired of war. But our Pearl Harbor already happened,” he said.
Iran has grown stronger because of Obama’s indifference, he argued. The so-called Arab spring should have begun in Iran in 2009, but Obama failed to support democratic uprisings there. And yet he threw an ally of the United States and Israel — Egypt — “under the bus” in the face of demonstrations that included the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, has had nothing but appeasement,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, learn from history.”

My sarcastic friend Dave Weigel mocks the “Santorum surge,” but Dave will be laughing out the other side of his face when Santorum claims victory Jan. 3 in Des Moines. Go give Rick Santorum $25, $50 or $100 just to spite Weigel. Anyway . . .

So I was standing out in the lobby after the Gingrich speech with several other reporters (including S.A. Miller of the New York Post, whom I used to work with at The Washington Times) who were on Newt stakeout duty, and guess who walked by? Scooter Libby, who is now a foreign-policy expert at the Hudson Institute.  That was cool.

The reporters and I were standing around talking Iowa caucus travel plans when — whoosh! — a couple of camera guys took off running: Newt had been spotted, and I raced to catch up with the scrum, getting pictures and videos.

“No more questions,” Newt was saying, as he posed for pictures with some of the event attendees. But reporters kept sticking microphones in his face and asking questions he’d just said he wouldn’t answer. The TV camera guys were really just shooting B-roll, and I was mainly trying not to get trampled by the scrum. There is nothing quite like a mob of media surrounding a Republican presidential front-runner.

Oh, and Trampled By The Scrum would be a great album title for an alternative-rock band.

Then I hopped a Metro train across the river here to The American Spectator office where I wasn’t really surprised to learn that they didn’t have any travel expense money for me today.

Maybe next week. Gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Hit the freaking tip jar.

Now I’m due for a party tonight hosted by the Prosper Group, an “online strategy” operation smart enough to invite me to their party. Expect incriminating pictures tomorrow of Republican operatives having decadent fun, some of whom will be buttonholing me in the near future to write nice things about their clients.

This is why you pay me the medium bucks, eh?


Rick Santorum: Praise by Sarah Palin ‘Absolutely Critical’ to His Money Surge

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When Sarah Palin singled out Rick Santorum for praise last week during her appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, she got a lot of people’s attention. Danny Yadron of the Wall Street Journal and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review took notice, as did America’s leading practicioner of Neutral Objective Journalism.

Far more important, however, was the attention Palin’s praise generated among her most loyal admirers:

For Santorum … her words may have been answered prayer, providing the underdog candidate with the kind of fundraising boost his low-budget campaign needs in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
“Our small dollar donations have just dramatically increased, which is, you know, a great sign for us… and I think Sarah Palin’s comments were  absolutely critical to that,” Santorum said, adding that there has also been a noticeable “spike” in traffic to his campaign website. …

Please read the whole thing. Since Palin broke her supporters’ hearts with her Oct. 5 announcement that she wouldn’t be a candidate in 2012, a lot of pundits seem to have decided that she is no longer  politically relevant. Yet Palin still has a powerful influence over the many thousands of grassroots conservatives who admire her and some of them — especially including Lisa Graas — are quite literally praying that she’ll make her magic happen by endorsing Rick Santorum.

Crazy? Yeah, but crazy things have been happening all year in the fight for the Republican 2012 nomination, And you know if Sarah Palin were to shock the world with an endorsement before the Iowa caucuses, outraged reactions from “experts” like Karl Rove would be like a gift-wrapped present under somebody’s Christmas tree in her home on the shores of Wasilla’s lovely Lake Lucille. I’m just sayin’ . . .

You can say that’s just crazy-talk, but it’s not crazier than this: Only one candidate in the 2012 Republican presidential race has visited all 99 counties in Iowa, and he’s also the only candidate who knows the title of the national anthem of Vanuatu.

I’m not kidding. Continue reading Rick Santorum: Praise by Sarah Palin ‘Absolutely Critical’ to His Money Surge →

You Have To Admire Nancy Pelosi

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by Smitty

Daily Pundit reacts to Nancy Pelosi’s outburst of affection for Newt Gingrich with a wild burst of affection:

Pelosi’s real worry is that a Gingrich Presidency probably means she’ll end up doing some time in the Graybar Hotel for her own depredations. Gingrich is notably petty and vindictive, and he’s just mean enough – and knowledgeable enough – to wreak vengeance on the California Cupid Stunt.
You know what, though? She’s got bupkus that will make any difference. The Dems are absolutely terrified of Newt Gingrich in the White House. He’s got their numbers, knows where all their bodies, living and dead, are buried, and has a history of doing more damage to their power than any single man since the advent of the FDR era. Remember, it was Newt who broke their half-century stranglehold on the House of Representatives, the wellspring of legislation, a stranglehold they’ve never since really regained. They fear him with a great fear, and with extremely good reason.

I’m not fully sold on Newt. I seem to recall a time when I was just old enough to vote, that Newt was Speaker. Ross Perot, that proto-Tea Partier, had just split the conservative vote, and given us Bubba. Newt’s Contract with America was a swell way to harness that Perot energy. Where did that energy go?

Nancy understands exactly where the lines are. I don’t buy that her statement is less than calculated. She buys a substantial chunk of the value of any ‘Newtaquiddick’ revelations merely by hinting at their ‘existence’. There is the insinuation that something really bad has gone on. Maybe Newt likes to use cars as submarines?

This is a fact-free finger point. Her task is merely to sow doubt, as she’s quickly walked the hint back to nothing not publicly available. You have to see this as the same technique used to take down Herman Cain. Whether or not substantial evidence outside of public view exists matters not; those who, gullibly, believe thing #1 in the stream of effluent emerging from Pelosi will figure that, like Herman Cain, Newt absolutely has to be hiding something: Newt is guilty.

Says Nancy

“I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year.”

The supply of loose Al-Qaeda thugs has certainly dwindled, but there still enough out there that three could be found with whom we should like to lock Nancy in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. It might help adjust her attitude. The aroma alone could help clear her head. Those guys are so malodorous as to make #Occupy hippies pleasant by comparison.

The real point here is that the notion of innocence until guilt is proven needs some shoring. Nancy herself is likely technically free of any wrongdoing, as detailed in Throw Them All Out. We should not let the urge for emotional satisfaction in seeing her marched off to jail trigger any ex post facto witch hunts. The last century of Progressivism has been an extended act of theft. Guilt abounds. So, hammer Nancy if in fact she is found in violation of existing law, but be very, very careful about the ready, shoot, aim approach.

Newt, one hopes, will offer some Saul-to-Paul testimony that can build confidence that he’s not pulling the ’90s stunt of harnessing patriotic energy to further the Progressive project. It’s something of an irony that the guy with arguably the most education about what the country was founded to be is the guy with the least publicly demonstrated will to carry out that founding vision.

Hence the Santorum interest. And may God have mercy on the foul Nancy Pelosi.

Also brimming with affection for Nancy: Dell Hill “Granny Rictus McBotoxImplants”. To which I’ll reply:

Michael Corleone: No! Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

The poor wee Nancy.

But this afternoon, Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, suggested that her comments have been misconstrued beyond the leader’s intent.

Representative Pelosi, if you had any less credibility, you would be Harry Reid. Your little backstab had precisely the intended effect, just as you send Hammill out to play the ‘misconstrued’ card.

The only people who believe you, Nancy, are those whose belief you rent.

Update: linked by Fischersville Mike, who makes the interesting point that Newt has been a Virginian for the last decade.

Guess Who Says, ‘Santorum’s Time’?

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Don Surber, “The Pro From Poca” :

The biggest beneficiary of Herman Cain’s decision to pull the plug on his campaign on Saturday was Rick Santorum, who is the last conservative standing as the Republican Party offers the Tea Party crowd their choice of RINOs. . . .
Need I remind people that at this point in 2007, the average of the polls showed Republicans were at Rick Giuliani 25.7%, John McCain 13.8%, Fred Thompson 13.7%, Rick Huckabee 13.5%, Mitt Romney 10.5%, Ron Paul 4.5%.
Not only is it not over till the fat lady sings, she has not even entered the theater.
Rick Santorum is and he is auditioning.

Read the whole thing and keep in mind that Rick Santorum is the only candidate in the GOP 2012 field who has visited all 99 counties in Iowa. Now he’s got Don Surber, he’s got Da Tech Guy, he’s got Lisa Graas and he’s got . . . Well, a neutral objective journalist certainly cannot ignore this unexpected upsurge of interest in the Rick Santorum campaign.

The pundits want you to think everything’s already settled, but here’s a headline you probably missed:

60% of Iowa Republicans Can Still
Change Mind in Latest Iowa Caucus Poll

That’s not a headline you’ll read in the MSM.

SANTORUM VOWS: ‘NO SURRENDER!’

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has published a full-page ad in Iowa newspapers in which the former Pennsylvania senator vows to “protect America’s moral foundation.”

The new ad, clearly aimed at social conservatives who are a key GOP constituency in the Hawkeye State, is timed to coincide with Santorum’s three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour of Iowa, which began Sunday in Sioux City.

“I believe what makes America exceptional is not just our economic potential or our remarkable innovation, but the fact that we are a moral enterprise,” Santorum says in the ad (click here to view in PDF format). “As President, I will protect America’s moral foundation, empower American families and build America’s economic freedom. And I won’t compromise on my values to do so.”

In a press release, the Santorum campaign said the new ad will appear “in several major Iowa papers” including the Des Moines Register.

RECENTLY:


Software Enhanced Politics: Perl Flip-Flop

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by Smitty

Coding is actually fun, not that I have time to do much anymore, because you can work on small problems and actually solve them. In politics, you talk about solving problems as though a closed-form solution was somehow obtainable. In the blog world, you can compare this site to a retail shopping trip to a department store. Your web browser is the sales associate, busily getting the shoes in hopes of a fit. The database is the store-room, with all the merchandise arranged to cram in the most stock, while still retaining easy access, if not best display. The internet and web server is all of the streets and traffic signals between your house and the parking lot, doing all of the utterly boring work of moving traffic along according to some relatively stable protocol, say HTTP.

The wildly dynamic work of getting just the right style of shoe in the right size and determining that the shoe fits, so that you can wear it, lands on the scripting engine. This particular blog is composed in WordPress, which is to the PHP language what Legalese is to English: sure, WordPress is PHP, but brings enough specialization to the task that you can’t just buy a PHP cookbook and expect to get very far with the WordPress codebase.

Who cares about these details? You wanted a blog post, not a meditation on coding. If all of the infrastructure works, you get the post, and the tools involved fade like presidential campaigns long since suspended. It matters not if the blogging tool is implemented in PHP, the relatively clean looking Python, or the quirky, idiomatic Perl.

Now and then, though, you get some reflection of software programs into political programs, of geek code into legal code, of information state into nation-state. This happened when I saw a post on the Perl ‘flip-flop’ operator. In electronics, you have the concept of the bi-stable multivibrator, which is far less kinky than it sounds. It’s essentially an electronic light switch, flipping on, or flopping off based upon an input, but, most importantly, staying that way, like an unprincipled politician awaiting the next lobbyist to flash some cast and adjust a vote.

Perl’s gift to software is to have more operators than the Democrat Party. So many, in fact, that some joker arranged them as a periodic table. Perl really fetishes operators, having around an order of magnitude more than most other languages with which you’d care to tangle. The subject of the post is the flip-flop operator, which has massive political application.

Perl 5 has a binary operator called flip-flop that is false until its first argument evaluates to true and it stays true (flips) until the second argument evaluates to true at which point it becomes false again (flops). This is such a useful operator that Perl 6 also has flip-flop, only it’s spelled ff and has a few variants:

ff
ff^
^ff
^ff^

The circumflex means to skip the end point on that end.
Perhaps some examples are in order …

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ff $_ == 13; }
# 9 10 11 12 13

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ff^ $_ == 13; }
# 9 10 11 12

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ^ff $_ == 13; }
# 10 11 12 13

for 1..20 { .say if $_ == 9 ^ff^ $_ == 13; }
# 10 11 12

As with a political tool, the software tool should provide maximum capacity to obscure meaning. This blog holds forth the hope that proper grasping of the nuances of the flip-flop operator will lead to greater dexterity in the assumption of positions which candidates have previously opposed. For example, usage of the flip-flop operator can allow simultaneous treatment of terrorism as a law enforcement issue on the one hand, while employing armed drones to atomize terrorists on the other, even if the terrorists are U.S. citizens, without the sordid embarrassment of a software crash. A physical light switch operated at modern political frequencies would shatter like a teleprompter falling to the cold, hard, real ground. The ephemeral nature of software brings to politician to that nirvana-like state of being able to hold two positions simultaneously. If the flip-flop operator were any more powerful, they should have to call it the Progress operator.

They Don’t Pay Extra for Tears

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My 12-year-old son Jefferson with Herman Cain, July 17, 2011.

Journalism is a cynical racket and if you can’t dismiss tragedy and suffering with a sarcastic joke, you don’t belong in a newsroom.

Famine and wars, airplane crashes, disease, murder — horrible stuff happens to people every day, and your job is to turn it into that commodity called “news.” You’re not paid to give a damn about the human beings whose lives are blighted or destroyed by these disasters.

And most of the time, you don’t give a damn. Because you can’t, really.

You’d go nuts if you ever stopped to think — much less care — about the unspeakable misery involved in so much of what we call “news.”

Over the past several days, I’ve made a lot of phone calls and talked to a lot of people who joined me aboard that wild ride called the “Cain Train.” My thought was to write the definitive post-mortem on the campaign, to analyze this disaster based on all I’ve seen and heard over the past year. But I didn’t write that article, and there’s a reason why.

You see, it’s become a family tradition that, every year, Daddy takes his sons out to buy The Best Christmas Tree Ever. For all my personal and professional failures — “Not Good Enough for BlogCon” — I have an unbroken streak of success at doing this one thing. Every year, Daddy goes to get the tree and every year when I bring it home, the entire family agrees that this is The Best Christmas Tree Ever.

So about 7 p.m., instead of transcribing audio and doing that definitive analytical post-mortem on the Cain campaign I’d meant to write, my boys and I went off to find The Best Christmas Tree Ever. Of course, we succeeded, but while we were on our quest (with my 19-year-old son Bob at the wheel), I did manage to do a couple of interviews with my cell phone and handy digital recorder.

By the time we got back home, it was 9 o’clock — my wife said, “Wow! It really is The Best Christmas Tree Ever!” — and my American Spectator deadline was just three hours away. So I had to work fast and, after I started writing, the story took a detour that surprised even me:

Mike Rogers was on board what became known as the Cain Train even before the locomotive left the station. A computer systems engineer who lives in New Hampshire, Rogers first heard Herman Cain speak at an Americans for Prosperity conference in 2009, and immediately believed the Georgia businessman should be the next President of the United States. Rogers and his wife gave the maximum legal contribution to Cain’s presidential exploratory committee before the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO officially announced his Republican primary candidacy in May.
“I was sitting in the front row for the announcement in Atlanta,” Rogers said Sunday, a day after Cain returned home to Atlanta to announce that he would suspend his campaign, which had soared to the top of the GOP field in early October but was eventually derailed by accusations of sexual misconduct that the 65-year-old candidate has insisted are false and politically motivated. In announcing his exit from the campaign trail, Cain said he was moving from “Plan A” — winning the White House in 2012 — to “Plan B,” an issues-advocacy website, but Saturday was definitely the end of the dream that Rogers and thousands of other self-declared “Cainiacs” had dreamed for months.
“Plan B is just face-saving,” Rogers said. “Unless he’s able to clear his name and get back in, or clear his name and be picked as the [vice-presidential running mate] for somebody, essentially his best bet is to take his raised profile and get back on the radio, maybe a little bit of TV, and push his policies. But really, it’s not going to have the same force as being in the field shaping the debate.”
Unlike the TV talking heads, print pundits and late-night comedians who spent the past five weeks reporting, analyzing or mocking each new accusation against Cain, it’s not easy for true believers like Rogers to move on. The media immediately turned their attention to speculating about which of the remaining Republican candidates will benefit most from Cain’s painful encounter with the politics of personal destruction, while the dreamers awoke to life without a dream. . . . .

You really should read the whole thing. Some words you write with tears in your eyes, but they don’t pay extra for that. So I suppose I’ll be content with knowing I got The Best Christmas Tree Ever — again!

 





SANTORUM SUNDAY EXPRESS: Exclusive Video From May 2011 At SFVRC

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by Smitty

The San Fernando Valley Republican Club invited Rick Santorum to speak prior to the initial GOP debate. Richard McEnroe, the esteemed vast right wing conspirator who blogs at Three Beers Later has honored this blog with the opportunity to preview the video of Rick Santorum’s speech, to maximize the audience reach.

“A Tea Party kinda guy, before there was a Tea Party”

These videos are useful to anyone interested in getting to know Rick Santorum more. Enjoying these videos while building up the post, I can state without reservation that Santorum ‘gets it’, without the baggage of Romney or Gingrich. I hope that Iowa turns into his campaign boomlet.

Santorum discusses rights, responsibility, the revolutionary nature of the REAL contract with America… and why the Progressives need to break that contract.

The White House views you as sheep.

How to bootstrap a stumbing economy… and who wants to stop us. The Boeing jobs Santorum alludes to may yet survive.

On his opponents, entitlements and how to fix both. These uncapped entitlements mean that we cannot know beforehand how much we will spend on them. The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB*) is a new cap for Medicare.

Rick talks about races he’s won in the past and why he can win this one…

Santorum offers the base their shot at the media and the party and answers questions.

Thank you very much to Three Beers Later for recording and posting this.

Update: linked by Don Surber, with further Santorum thoughts.

* ‘Ipab’ may mean ‘Death Panel’ in Swahili; I’m not sure.