Category: Washington State

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Santorum’s National Iowa-Style Strategy

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Andrea Tantaros of Fox News interviews Rick Santorum
at CPAC in Washington, D.C., Friday, Feb. 10, 2012

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland
Back home from CPAC with about 300 business cards, two days’ growth of beard, and a voice hoarse from rocking out with Chris Cassone at Friday’s “Unsustainable Bar Tab” reception. Also, I’ve got beaucoups of photos and videos that I was unable to upload during the conference due to frustration with bandwidth issues. (Wombat suggests that it was my equipment rather than the WiFi connection that sucked. However, it is a curious fact that as soon as I hooked up the trusty Toshiba Satellite to my home network, it worked perfectly.)

Smitty previously noted that Rick Santorum has taken his first lead in a national poll — you can see the full breakdown at Public Policy Polling (PDF file) — and I would further suggest that you keep an eye on polls in Michigan over the next week or so. The current Real Clear Politics average has Santorum in fourth place, but all of the polls included in the RCP average date back to late January/early February, before Newt Gingrich’s embarrassment in Nevada, and before Santorum’s Tuesday hat trick in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

Sources close to the Santorum campaign say they’re going to challenge Romney in Michigan, which may seem like a kamikaze mission in Romney’s home state, but Santorum believes his message can win over blue-collar voters in the industrial Midwest — a belief that would appear to have been ratified in Minnesota and Missouri. Although the odds are long, Santorum will campaign hard in Michigan, which holds its primary Feb. 28, knowing that if he can upset Mitt there . . . well, game on.

Money? Extrapolating from early reports and cryptic hints from sources close to the campaign, I believe Santorum raised $5 million online last week, and when I talked Saturday morning to a top official with Santorum’s direct mail team, his comment was, “I can’t wait until Monday.” The boost Santorum got from last week’s hat-trick would obviously take a few days to produce a response from folks whose contributions involve checks sent by snail mail, and his team expects a huge influx of such contributions to come pouring in Monday and continuing through the week. Continue reading Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Santorum’s National Iowa-Style Strategy →

By The Time The World’s Youngest Blogger Can Consider College. . .

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by Smitty (via Gateway Pundit)

By the time the World’s Youngest Blogger can consider college, I anticipate there will be some outfit in academia advertising itself explicitly as ‘*-studies free’.

The classes, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Sunday, were to be held on the Plaza at SCCC and include such subjects as

  • “Why We Support Occupy,”
  • “Legislative Lobbying,”
  • “The Art of the Protest Sign” and
  • “Filming to Document Human Rights Violations.”

Classes will continue throughout the night.

Karen Strickland, Seattle President of the American Federation of Teachers said in an open letter to Paul Kilpatrick, President of SCCC that the board is in support of SCCC accommodating the request of Occupy Seattle for a number of reasons.

I wonder if “Filming to Document Human Rights Violations” will be some sort of Criminology twofer, if the allegations of sexual assault (via Drudge) at #OWS gatherings have any merit. I suspect they may, and trust the authorities and the media to be on the case.

Seattle is a really great place, at least it was back in the Reagan administration when I was a high school student there. Yet the seeds and early shoots of this kind of idiocy were apparent then.

MSM Starting to Cover ‘WeinerGate’ UPDATE: More Details Now Emerging UPDATE: Weiner DM’d a Porn Star?

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8 p.m. ET: GENETTE CORDOVA ISSUES STATEMENT

* * 4:10 p.m. ET: RE-BUMPED FOR UPDATE BELOW * *

* * 1:10 p.m. ET: BUMPED FOR UPDATE BELOW * * 

Genette Nicole Cordova, the 21-year-old college student to whom the photo was sent.

About 10 p.m. last night, I figured we had enough facts that I should put together a “Joe Friday”-style straight-news version of the WeinerGate saga, which I posted at The American Spectator:

The Internet was abuzz Saturday after it was reported that Rep. Anthony Weiner had apparently sent a lewd photo to a Seattle-area college student.
The New York Democrat quickly asserted that his online accounts had been “hacked” after Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com reported that Weiner’s Twitter account was used to send the photo, which shows the pelvic area of a man in gray undershorts with his tumescent penis bulging. . . .

Read the whole thing. By the time I got that story finished and online, Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith of Politico had this: “Weiner’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether he has contacted federal authorities to report the alleged cyber-attack, which could fall under laws prohibiting cyberhacking and impersonating federal officials.”

That’s crucial. By claiming that his accounts had been “hacked,” Weiner was asserting that he was the victim of a crime, which he would obviously want to report to the proper authorities. And Weiner’s claim is now a matter of public record, reported by the New York Post:

“Anthony’s accounts on both Facebook and Twitter were hacked,” said spokesman Dave Arnold.
The photo does not belong to the Democrat and wasn’t taken by him, Arnold added.

OK, then, let the crime be reported to the FBI so that the mysterious malefactor can be appehended and brought to justice. But the facts of the case are just starting to look very strange. Continue reading MSM Starting to Cover ‘WeinerGate’ UPDATE: More Details Now Emerging UPDATE: Weiner DM’d a Porn Star? →

Seattle Police: ‘No Reason to Suspect Foul Play’ in Marizela Perez’s Disappearance

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Michelle Malkin updates readers on the missing-person case involving her 18-year-old cousin, University of Washington student Marizela “Mei” Perez, who hasn’t been seen since Saturday:

The Seattle PD says it has probable visual identification of Marizela boarding the Othello train near her home in the Rainier Beach area and commuting into the University District during the noon hour on Saturday. . . . There’s evidence that she was last seen Saturday afternoon at the Safeway in the city’s University District on 4732 Brooklyn Ave NE between 1-2pm. At some point during that time, purchases were made on her debit card.
The police say they “have no reason to suspect foul play” at this point.

That is good news: If there were evidence of a kidnapping or some other crime, the police would have said as much. However, Mei’s family has reason to be extremely concerned, as a Seattle Times story makes clear:

Perez’s father, Edgar Perez, from New Jersey, said he was flying to Seattle on Monday to help in the search. . . .
Perez said his daughter has been living with her aunt and uncle.
Edgar Perez said he called his daughter about 4 p.m. Saturday, but got no answer. Normally, he said, she calls back within five minutes, but he didn’t hear back from her.
“If she’s going to be late she always calls us,” he said. He said he contacted Perez’s boyfriend, and he hadn’t seen Marizela either.
Lauro Mendoza said he last saw her at noon Saturday and expected her back at dinnertime.
“She always comes home on time,” her uncle said.

The fact that she hasn’t called her family or friends, as she usually does, obviously raises very serious worries. There are a lot of people remembering the Perez family in their prayers.

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