Haughton is estranged from his wife who works as a hair stylist at the salon where the shooting took place. . . .
Court records show that a judge issued a order of protection against Haughton just three days ago on October 18, hinting that there was a credible threat against the estranged wife.
His estranged wife has two daughters, one of whom works at the spa and was whisked away by police after the shooting.
So, an ordinary domestic dispute has turned into a headline-making atrocity and — because the gunman is not a Tea Party “extremist” — liberals will be unable to find any convenient political “moral to the story.” Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Suppose that a father wished to advise his son against taking liberties with young ladies, lest the boy be unfairly accused of a crime. Now, suppose that the boy grew up to be a Republican state legislator in Wisconsin, and decided that his dear old Dad’s advice would be worth sharing with the press. Prepare to be horrified and embarrassed, dear friends:
When a Chetek Alert reporter asked state Rep. Roger Rivard in December to comment on the case in which a 14-year-old girl accused a 17-year-old boy of sexually assaulting her, the Rice Lake lawmaker said his father told him: “Some girls, they rape so easy.” Rivard said last week the comment was his father’s way of warning him that a woman could agree to sex but then later claim the act wasn’t consensual.
He said later that same day that his comments could be misconstrued and that he viewed rape as a horrible crime.
Dear old Dad might have added, along with his words of wisdom, “You probably never want to have to explain this to the media.”
Perhaps the Republican Party should send out a memo to its officials and candidates: The minute a reporter says the word “rape,” terminate the interview immediately.
Note that ‘reason’ encounters a Left-wing singularity right around #3 above. These strikes make precious little sense, unless you figure that they may be a faux crisis ginned up for #OccupyResoluteDesk to solve. Maybe something can be done about the Troglopundit, too. Midnight visit by brownshirts? They’ll need plenty of lighting for the bog, though.
At any rate, the completely weird reversal of a decision from the WI Supreme Court makes no sense unless it’s a tile in a bigger mural. It’s sort of a Checkov’s Gun situation. If I’m wrong, you can see me at CPAC for a cup of coffee.
Update: noted. . .
I could be wrong but I believe a strike is illegal here RT @smitty_one_each: Prediction: Public Sector Strike In WI bit.ly/O8utJQ
“I’m proud to stand with a man who understands what it takes to foster job creation in our economy, someone who knows from experience, that if you have a small business — you did build that. . . . I’m excited for what lies ahead and I’m thrilled to be a part of America’s Comeback Team. And together, we will unite America and get this done.”
— Rep. Paul Ryan, Norfolk, Virginia, Aug. 11, 2012
This is predictable, and is the best argument for picking a conservative like Ryan: No matter whom Romney had chosen, the Democrats would have demonized the GOP running mate as a Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Dick Cheney and Martin Bormann.
In that kind of situation, why not go bold?
So we’ll have a few days of “evil heartless Paul Ryan,” then the Democrats will go back to the “clueless rich guy Romney” message and then, if the Romney-Ryan ticket moves ahead of Obama in the polls, they’ll start playing the Mormon card with frenzied desperation.
“This is an emergency post. . . . Mitt Romney must choose Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee, period.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 4, 2012
Who would have thunk it, huh? Friday night I went to bed early, and Ali Akbar kept calling to tell me the news, but my wife couldn’t get me to wake up. The headlines in the order they appeared at Memeorandum:
Everybody I talked to last Friday night at the Americans for Prosperity Summit — Aug. 3, at the terrace bar of the Washington Hilton — said it was going to be Tim Pawlenty.
That inspired a sort of panic: “Good Lord, not T-Paw!” When I heard that Marco Rubio had been eliminated due to “vetting” issues, I started an all-out push for Paul Ryan. One of the first people I spoke to was Suhail Khan of Americans for Tax Reform who told me, “Ryan vets. The worst thing they could come up with was that he worked as a bartender at Tortilla Coast when he first came to D.C.”
That was Saturday afternoon. In addition to pushing Ryan on Twitter, Ali was busy behind the scenes. After a long conversation with him on Tuesday, I reported the final three:
That post was linked by Jackie Wellfonder, Bob Belvedere, Andrew J. Patrick and others. By then, the conservative drumbeat for Ryan was getting loud enough that headlines were popping up left and right. When Alex Moe of NBC News reported that Ryan was planning a “vacation”? Yeah, that was a tea leaf. And by Thursday, the choice was clear:
When I finally woke up and called Ali about 3 a.m. today, he was driving to Norfolk to attend the rally where Mitt Romney will announce this morning that Paul Ryan will be the next vice president of the United States. Did the #GiveUsRyan hashtag have as much influence as, say, Bill Kristol pleading on Ryan’s behalf? No, but it definitely had an impact: Ali has friends on the Romney staff and, when the word started leaking out Friday, the Romney staffers told him, “Good work, Ali.”
Your Tweets — and you know who you are — definitely made a difference. As I explained Thursday, Romney’s people pay attention to their online metrics. Every Tweet to @MittRomney with #GiveUsRyan was a signal that Ryan was the grassroots consensus.
UPDATE: Instalanche! BTW, there are some retroactive hindsight claims by GOP “insiders” that Mitt picked Ryan before Aug. 4, but don’t believe it. That’s just the Establishment trying to deny credit to the conservative grassoots.
Four days later, my skepticism is beginning to evaporate. By Tuesday evening, the tea leaves indicated that what had merely been suspected during the weekend — the veepstakes was coming down to a three-way contest between Ryan, Tim Pawlenty and Rob Portman — had become a reality. Even I was shocked Wednesday morning, however, when I saw that MSNBC had confirmed this. There’s a difference between reading tea leaves and getting it confirmed as actual news.
The key was figuring out that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, despite being on the official short list, had a “vetting” problem that eliminated him from being a finalist for the nomination. The fact that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal praised Ryan on Sunday was also a pretty big hint of which short-lister was the real conservative favorite. So it was either the two “safe” choices (Pawlenty and Portman) or else the last remaining “bold” choice, Ryan. The other names being bounced around in public were just distractions, and Bill Kristol’s push for Ryan was a clear signal that the insiders knew what the real running mate discussion was about.
Well, is this all because of Ali and the #GiveUsRyan hashtag? No, of course not. There are lots of conservatives working independently in different ways to make this happen.
But your Tweets do matter. They do make a difference. Just remember to direct your Tweets to @MittRomney and include the #GiveUsRyan hashtag — Mitt’s online campaign keeps track of their mentions, and every Tweet counts.
You’ll notice that there hasn’t been a lot of media attention to the Wisconsin killer since it emerged that he was a neo-Nazi skinhead, rather than (as various left-wing idiots on Twitter initially claimed) someone inspired to his crime by Michele Bachmann.
There were some complaints about CNN calling the killer “far right,” but I’m not going to get all excited about that: OK, Wade Page was “far right” in the same sense that Lee Harvey Oswald was “far left.” The important distinction to be made is not between what ideological “wing” a killer belongs to, but rather whether there was any actual connection between the criminal and a mainstream political movement.
It was evidently the hope of some on the Left that the slaughter in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, could be blamed on mainstream GOP politics. Once this political theory of the crime was disproven, the national media began to lose interest in the criminal and his crime.
A fringe kook, evidently driven to murderous despair by a breakup with his fringe kook girlfriend? Neither of them with any connection or affinity to the political mainstream?
Not a Rush Limbaugh listener? Not a Michele Bachmann supporter?
The media shrugs: Nothing to see here, move along.
