Category: Nevada

Next Stop: Searchlight

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LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Just a quick note before I make the run to Searchlight with Steve Foley to check out the scene before tomorrow’s big Tea Party rally. (See today’s front-page story in the Las Vegas Sun.)

I’m now blogging from the headquarters of Liberty First PAC, otherwise known as Eric Odom’s kitchen. Today I went out to the headquarters of both the Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian GOP Senate campaigns.

Lowden’s HQ on the south side of town near Highway 215.

Tarkanian HQ off Durango Drive.

Eric Odom and Steve Foley in the nerve center of Tea Party grassroots political organizing, otherwise known as Eric’s kitchen.

All right. Off to Searchlight . . .

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Reason #7,126 Why Alyssa Milano
Should Be Following Me on Twitter

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Just in case you were wondering:

LAS VEGAS – Now Tweeting completely naked in Room 249 at the Orleans Hotel. About to get in the shower. Checkout time in 1 hr, 17 minutes.

All I need is just one re-Tweet, Alyssa.

Now it’s nearly checkout time, which means I’m fully dressed — including the fedora I borrowed from Da Tech Guy — and ready to take that big red Chevy rental car on the road to do some campaign coverage before heading out to Searchlight to see the Tea Party site.

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Fear and Loathing, Et Cetera

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Yes, I’m here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, home base for my coverage of the kickoff of the Tea Party Express III tour, among other things.

Fortuitously, I arrived on the birthday of Minority Report blogger Steve Foley, and his birthday was celebrated in appropriate fashion. IYKWIMAITYD. Even more fortuitously, when JSF of Valley of the Shadow blog heard I was coming to Vegas, he offered me this excellent advice: “Put it all on red.”

Dude. You’ve got no idea how well that advice paid off. But as for those other losers . . .

UPDATE 11:10 a.m. ET: My biological clock is screwed up. I’d left a wake-up call for 9 a.m. — i.e., noon ET — and snapped wide awake to see 7:43 on the clock. But was that a.m. or p.m.? All things considered, it was entirely possible that I’d slept 16 hours and missed an entire day’s work. But no, I’d slept only four hours and the question now was, should I get up and start working or go back to bed for another hour? But if I went back to sleep, I might oversleep for real this time. While I debated this, I checked the headlines at Memeorandum:

Obama Refuses to Dine With Jewish Leader

Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama ‘dumped him for dinner’

Obama demands Netanyahu’s peace answers by Saturday

OK, I’m awake now. Armaggedon looms. Four hours sleep will have to do.

UPDATE 2:08 p.m. ET: Just so the tip-jar hitters know this trip isn’t all fun and games, I’m about to go do some actual shoe-leather reporting today.

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Law Enforcement Prepares for Massive Tea Party Crowd Saturday in Nevada

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Did the news that I’m coming out West provoke this frenzy?

Whenever hundreds of vehicles and dozens of buses unload passengers in a town with fewer than 1,000 people, traffic is bound to be a problem. It’s magnified when few roads lead into town.
Welcome to the Tea Party Express stop in Searchlight.
The strategy of law enforcement officials and rally organizers for Saturday’s noon event is basically to ensure attendees arrive and depart safely and to alleviate as much chaos as possible in town.
State Department of Transportation spokesman Bob McKenzie said his agency’s primary concern is to keep traffic along U.S. Highway 95 moving smoothly. The rally site is a quarter-mile off the highway, potentially making it a logistical challenge to keep buses and vehicles from backing up at the side-road turnoff. . . .

All this, just for me? Or is it Andrea Shea King? Well, OK, there’s also Andrew Breitbart, Joe the Plumber, Wayne Allyn Root, Dick Armey, Roger Hedgecock, Melanie Morgan and a certain former governor of Alaska . . .

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Ann Coulter Hears a Houle

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They shut down her speech Tuesday in the People’s Republic of Ottawa, but the Canadian Thought Police couldn’t prevent her from filing her latest column:

This marks the first time I’ve ever gotten hate mail for something I might do in the future.
Apparently Canadian law forbids “promoting hatred against any identifiable group,” which the provost, Francois A. Houle advised me, “would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”
I was given no specific examples of what words and phrases I couldn’t use, but I take it I’m not supposed to say, “F— you, Francois.” . . .
Both writer Mark Steyn and editor Ezra Levant have been investigated by the Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred toward Muslims.
Levant’s alleged crime was to reprint the cartoons of Mohammed originally published in a Danish newspaper, leading practitioners of the Religion of Peace to engage in murderous violence across the globe. Steyn’s alleged crime was to publish an excerpt of his book, “America Alone” in Maclean’s magazine, in which he jauntily described Muslims as “hot for jihad.”
Both of them also flew jet airliners full of passengers into skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, resulting in thousands of deaths. No, wait — that was somebody else. . . .
The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals — screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm. . . .
Local reporters couldn’t make out what the crowd was chanting, but it was something about “Molson” and a “sled dog.” . . .

Read the whole thing. Also read Ezra Levant:

Where did this abusive student culture come from? What explains the complete lack of tolerance for different opinions? . . .
No one less than the vice-president had signalled that the ancient academic ideals of free discourse had been replaced with conformity, political correctness, censorship — and even the threat of criminal prosecution.
Houle’s letter was like a starter pistol for radical students, who went from tearing down Coulter posters to organizing their rampage. Really, other than tactics, how different was their approach to censorship than Houle’s?

Mark Steyn:

The quality of your argument is only important if you want to win by persuasion. But it’s irrelevant if you want to win by intimidation. . . .
Fatima Al Dhaher, the poor wee thing traumatized by Ann Coulter’s camel joke, turns out to be a Jew-hater who wants to eliminate the State of Israel, and belongs to a group who regard Jews as “subhuman” “zionazis/kikeroaches“. But that’s too complicated for the media to fit into their Sesame Street narratives.

Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury has much, much more. Coulter speaks tonight in Calgary, where security has been “significantly augmented.” Those concerned about “hate” should ask themselves why a syndicated columnist should need as much security on a Canadian campus as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got when he spoke at Columbia University. (Hint: Coulter doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.)

Her American fans who wish to welcome Ann back to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave should hop a flight to Vegas, baby! Coulter will speak at Saturday’s Tea Party Express event in Hendersonville, Nevada. And I’ll be flying out to Vegas tonight.

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Just Booked My Flight: Vegas, Baby!

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“Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. . . . Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. … Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

OK, the original plan had been to drive to Vegas, but that was before life got complicated and the weasels forced me to spend a whole week blogging about their sordid ObamaCare scam — about which, the less said, the better.

Among the unfortunate side effects of that disaster, however, was the catastrophic scrambling of my travel plans because I needed an extra day or two to finish up arrangements in Washington before leaving, and because the drive time from here to Nevada is 38 hours, the cross-country itinerary wouldn’t work out if I was going to be there to pick up Ali Akbar at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport for the trip to Searchlight to catch the start of the Tea Party Express III tour.

And if any of that makes sense to you, you need more drugs. That makes two of us, but don’t worry. Gonzo is a pre-existing condition and, thanks to Bart Stupak, now we can bill taxpayers for our heinous chemicals.

Never mind. Hit the tip jar, because I paid $528 for the cheapest possible round-trip to Vegas, leaving here Thursday afternoon and not returning until next Wednesday. Mrs. Other McCain is already mad enough without me getting stuck with that tab, even though I’ll be saving money by crashing on Steve Foley’s sofa in Vegas. Plus, I’ll have to pay $75 a day for a rental car so I can drive Ali to Searchlight, hang out a few hours, then turn around and drive back to Vegas in time for Ann Coulter’s appearance at the Henderson Pavillion.

After that day of insanity and whatever weirdness Foley gets me into Saturday night, then I’ve got to get up Sunday morning and drive 300 miles (20 cents per mile = $60) to meet the Tea Party Express in Phoenix, Arizona, where Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom blog has promised me face-time with J.D. Hayworth and Vernon Parker. So I’ll spend Sunday and Monday in Phoenix, drive another 300 miles back to Vegas on Tuesday morning, and do some more reporting on the campaign against Harry Reid before catching a red-eye back home with a 3-hour layover in Minneapolis.

Only a lunatic would attempt to cram all this into six days. So hit the tip jar, because where else are you going to find a lunatic who’s also a professional journalist?

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Q & A With Ann Coulter: Vegas, Baby!

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Ann Coulter will speak Saturday in Las Vegas at a Tea Party rally, and not only has she invited everybody to join her in Vegas, but she agreed to this exclusive e-mail interview with The Other McCain:

1. Is this event in Vegas your first Tea Party rally, or have you been quietly lurking in the crowds for months?

I’ve been at all of them. The reason you didn’t see me in the MSM coverage is that I’m an African-American.

2. Why do the major media keep trying to portray the Tea Party movement as a bunch of dangerous scary racists?

Oh it’s nothing against the tea partiers — they think all Americans are dangerous scary racists.

3. Speaking of dangerous scary racists, do you think Sen. Robert Byrd will rediscover his attachment to parliamentary principle and object to Nancy Pelosi’s constitutional end-run with the health care bill?

Yes, right after he remembers where he left the remote.

4. You’re going on a speaking tour of Canada — aren’t you afraid their human-rights commissars will declare you a thought-criminal?

I hope they send the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after me!

Don’t worry. They’re not sending Mounties, just the usual whiny liberals.

Thanks, for the interview Ann! See you Saturday in Vegas!

UPDATE: Just in case you thought I was joking about those Canadian human-rights commissars, check out this letter that
François Houle, University of Ottawa provost, sent to Coulter:

We have a great respect for freedom of expression in Canada, as well as on our campus, and view it as a fundamental freedom, as recognized by our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States.
I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here. You will realize that Canadian law puts reasonable limits on the freedom of expression.
For example, promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.

The only “indentifiable group” against which Coulter promotes hatred* is bloodthirsty jihadi terrorists, but I suppose she could always add “Canadian academic douchebags named François” to the list. As Rich Fader says in the comments:

Creepy. And not creepy in a “hey, baby, you and me, huh?” kind of way. Creepy in a “nice freedom of speech you have there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” kind of way.

Kathy Shaidle has more at Five Feet of Fury.

(* – Well, perhaps not “hatred,” exactly. “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” sounds more like missionary zeal to me. Your mileage may vary.)

UPDATE II: INSTALANCHE! Uh, actually, this is what we call a SecondHandaLanche, which is when someone who links you gets linked by Professor Glenn Reynolds. But we’ll take whatever we can get . . .

UPDATE III: Just booked my flight: Vegas, baby!

MORE BLOGGING:

Who Is Jon Scott Ashjian?

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We know that he owes $200,000 in back taxes. We know that his “Tea Party” candidacy is Harry Reid’s only hope for re-election. There are many questions being asked in Nevada:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is facing Republican accusations that he’s behind the emergence of a third-party Tea Party candidate on the ballot who could divide conservative voters and help him win reelection this fall.
The charge against Jon Scott Ashjian is being led by his would-be GOP opponents, such as Danny Tarkanian, who accuses him of having weak tea party ties. “Nobody in the Tea Party knows who he is. He didn’t know any of the principles of the Tea Party,” Tarkanian told [CNN].
GOP primary field leader Sue Lowden, a former Nevada Republican Party chairman who calls herself a Tea Party voter, also questioned Ashjian’s tea party bona fides. “I don’t know who this person is. He’s never been involved with anything that I’m aware of in this state,” she told CNN.

Gee, it seems like the only person who’s not questioning Ashjian’s credibility is . . . Harry Reid.

However much we know about Ashjian, I don’t think we know enough yet. The Tea Party Express will be in Las Vegas March 27.

IYKWIMAITYD.