The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#ConcedeCochran: Will Republicans Keep Wasting More Money on the Loser?

Posted on | June 4, 2014 | 55 Comments

AUGUSTA, Georgia
We left Mississippi at 9:30 this morning, which gave me barely enough time to file a column for The American Spectator:

The most closely watched campaign in the country will continue for another three weeks, as Tea Party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel and Sen. Thad Cochran head to a June 24 runoff in the Republican primary here. Neither candidate won a majority in Tuesday’s primary vote, but McDaniel’s margin of about 2,000 votes out of more than 300,000 votes cast was enough for the young state senator to declare his win “a historic moment” for Mississippi.
“Our fight is not over,” McDaniel told the crowd in the Hattiesburg Convention Center ballroom last Tuesday night, as votes continued to be counted. “Whether it’s tomorrow, or whether it’s three weeks from tonight, we will stand victorious.”
The runoff was forced because there were three candidates on the ballot and a little-noticed third candidate, businessman Thomas Carey, got nearly 5,000 votes — only 1.6 percent of the total, but enough to keep McDaniel below the crucial majority needed to avoid the runoff. Yet the result Tuesday was cause for celebration among Tea Party activists who have spent months campaigning to defeat the six-term incumbent Cochran. . . .

You can read the whole thing. You might also want to read Molly Ball’s campaign wrap-up at The Atlantic. (She sat next to me at the press table last night in Hattiesburg.) Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC has already announced it will not waste any more money trying to re-elected the doomed Nixonian fossil. Today Ali Akbar launched the #ConcedeCochran hashtag campaign on Twitter:

When an incumbent is forced into a runoff in a primary, the handwriting is on the wall. The question is whether the dimwits at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Chamber of Commerce can recognize their error, or whether they’re going keep throwing away money in a hopeless attempt to prevent conservative Mississippi voters from electing a conservative senator.

My 10-day road trip will soon end — I plan to be back home Thursday night, having traveled first to the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans and then hitting the Mississippi primary campaign trail. After all the road-warrior travels I did between 2009 and 2012, I’ve mostly stayed at home the past 18 months. It’s good to get out on the road again, but I’m a grandpa now, and I’m looking forward to getting back to my wife and kids and — oh, yes — continuing to expose and dismantle radical feminism. Speaking of which . . .

Sandra Fluke will be on the ballot in California this November. California has become a cesspool of dangerous madness. My advice to sane Californians: Get out and don’t look back, or you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt when the brimstone starts raining down.

 

 

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Category: Election, Mississippi

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.04.14

Posted on | June 4, 2014 | 17 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Obama Admits Bergdahl Prisoner Swap Could Put Troops In Danger

Defending his idiotic decision at a press conference in Warsaw

Qatari officials doing nothing to restrain released terrorists

Red China Keeps Close Watch As Tienanmen Anniversary Arrives
Security tight as 25th anniversary of democracy protest near


Mississippi GOP Senate Primary Too Close To Call
Joni Ernst wins in Iowa



POLITICS
DIRNSA Defends Agency’s Facial Recognition Program

Admiral Michael Rogers

Plays down possibility that Snowden is foreign spy


NRA Criticizes Open Carry Group For Demonstrations



Former Charlotte Mayor Pleads Guilty In Corruption Case

McConnell Plans Senate Effort To Block EPA Emissions Regs

Openly Gay Candidate Advances In GOP Primary

Ft. Hood Sexual Assault Prevention Officer Ran Prostitution Ring



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Rises Ahead Of US Stockpiles Report: NYMEX $102.74, Brent $108.87
Fed’s Fisher Sees No Rate Hikes Until Next Year
Strong GDP Gives Aussie Dollar Temporary Glow
Red China Expresses “Strong Dissatisfaction” With US Solar Tariff
Treasuries Snap Rout As Outlook For ECB Rate Cut Buoys Demand
Hillshire To Talk With Tyson’s, Pilgrim’s Pride
Instagram Updated With Ten Powerful New Editing Tools
Microsoft At E3 2014: Behind The Eight Ball
AMD Launches Mobile Kaveri APUs
Google Releases 64-Bit Test Build For Chrome Browser
John Oliver’s Rant About Net Neutrality Crashes FCC Website



SPORTS
Singleton Stars In Debut As Astros Top Angels 7-2

Huge in Houston: Rookie 1b Jon Singleton

1 for 3 with 2 RBI on homer and bases-loaded walk

Nick Saban’s New Alabama Deal Could Pay Him $55 Million In 2022

A’s Rally Past Yankees In 10th On Brandon Moss Homer

Danica Patrick Pumped For Pocono

Late Comeback Lifts Cubs Past Mets

Cruz Homers In Return To Texas As O’s Beat Rangers

Marino Withdraws From NFL Concussion Lawsuit


Reds Beat Giants For Fourth Straight Win

Rockies Fall 4-2 To Snakes, Might Lose Gonzalez

Dozier Breaks Out, Spurs Twins 6-4 Win Against Brewers

Ryan Zimmerman Returns As LF, Nats Blitz Phillies 7-0



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Miranda Lambert Covers Rolling Stone’s Country Issue In Tight White Tank & Daisy Dukes

What, really, is there to say?

Dishes about Beyonce obsession, hubby Blake Shelton


Wachowskis’ “Jupiter Ascending” Delayed Until February 2015

Scott Derrickson To Direct “Dr. Strange”

More Freaking Out Over Racist Stuff By Justin Bieber

Solange Knowles, Rachel Roy Avoid Each Other At CFDA Awards


Angelina Jolie Hints At “Maleficent” Sequel During Shanghai Press Conference

Keira Knightley Was Told She Was Anorexic, Hated, And A “S**t Actress”

Karlie Kloss Says Best Friend Taylor Swift Has “No Time For Guys”

Coroner: Gwar Frontman Dave Brockie Died Of Heroin Overdose

See Jill Duggar’s Engagement Surprise

Will Smith To Star In NFL Concussion Drama



FOREIGNERS
On The Anniversary Of Tienanmen, Red China Chokes Google, Online Chatter
Isolation Deepens In Breakaway Ukraine Region As Rebels Dream of New Russia
July Deadline For Iran Nuke Deal Unlikely
US Reaffirms No Weapons To Ukraine
NATO Finalizing Military Aid Package For Ukraine
With Erdogan’s Power Growing, Turkey Becomes More Polarized
Huge Blow To BJP Ahead Of Maharashtra Polls



BLOGS & STUFF
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Vagueness Of Grieving Father’s Demands Makes Him Perfect Gun Control Poster Boy
Proof Positive: Jay Carney, We Hardly Knew Ye
Michelle Malkin: Flashback – A Reminder Of Bowe Bergdahl’s Desertion Problem
Twitchy: “Getting Worse By The Hour” – FNC Reports Bergdahl Renounced American Citizenship
American Power: Oakland Eco-Fascists Slammed For Caring More About Herons Than City’s Homeless
American Thinker: President Obama’s Exceptionally Productive Week
BLACKFIVE: Don’t Let The Bergdahl S**t-Storm Distract From Fixing the VA
Conservatives4Palin: Obama Opens His Latest War Against Energy And Jobs
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, June 3
Jammie Wearing Fools: Man Who Left Four Behind To Die In Benghazi Says “We Don’t Leave Men And Women In Uniform Behind”
Joe For America: Report Says EPA Climate Rule Will Cripple Coal Industry, Leave 224,000 Jobless
JustOneMinute: Two Papers In One
Pat Dollard: O’Reilly Says White House Insider Told Him Obama No Longer Cares About Public Opinion, Now Doing Whatever He Pleases, “Consequences Be Damned”
Protein Wisdom: “Vulnerable Senate Democrats Fear Impact Of New EPA Rule”
Shot In The Dark: The Revolution Will Be Nitpicked
STUMP: Public Pensions Primer – Why Do We Pre-Fund Pensions?
The Jawa Report: One Thousand Words On The Consequences Of Bow Bergdahl’s Desertion
The Lonely conservative: Liberals Vote For Policies They Don’t Want To Live With Or Pay For
This Ain’t Hell: A Five-Sided Kennel Of Cowardice
Weasel Zippers: State Department Claims Soldiers Who Served With Bergdahl Don’t Know What They’re Talking About
Megan McArdle: Brownie Mix Is For Eskimos And Fraidy-Cats


Category: Live at Five

Mississippi Primary Results HQ

Posted on | June 3, 2014 | 63 Comments

HATTIESBURG, Mississippi
UPDATE 10:40 p.m. CDT: Now with 93% of precincts reporting, McDaniel’s lead is 3,086 votes. He is at 49.7% of the vote, Cochran at 48.7%. If necessary, a runoff would be June 24.

UPDATE 10:10 p.m. CDT: With 89% of precincts reporting, McDaniel’s lead is about 3,500 votes.

UPDATE 9:40 p.m. CDT: With 77% of precincts reporting, McDaniel leads, 49.6% to 48.8% for Cochran.

* * * PREVIOUSLY (6:57 ET) * * *

The Convention Center here is the site of the Chris McDaniel victory party. Of course, election night events are always called a “victory party” in advance, even though you don’t know who will win the election until the votes are counted. Polls close at 7 p.m. CDT (8 Eastern) and we expect the vote to be extremely close, so it could be a long, long night. Here is some expert commentary:

Of course, I’m much better-looking in person. I’ll be updating regularly tonight as the vote totals come in. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 7:15 p.m. CDT: Polls have been closed for 15 minutes and, with 0% of precincts reporting, it’s McDaniel 0%, Cochran 0%.

UPDATE 8 p.m. CDT: Country singer Eric Welford is entertaining the crowd here. Meanwhile, with 3.4% of precincts reporting, it’s Cochran 52%, McDaniel 47%.

I’m sitting next to The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, who’s got a nice article about the pathetic fate of Thad Cochran.

 

 

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Category: Election, Mississippi

Jet Lag Blues

Posted on | June 3, 2014 | 17 Comments

— Wombat-socho


Apologies for the lack of Live At Five this morning, or even the token offering of In The Mailbox, but after being up since 0300 in order to make my 6 AM flight to Las Vegas, I was in no position to give either of those posts their due justice. However, before I saunter down Fremont Street to my doom at the Heart Attack Grill, I thought I should at least mention a few books that are worth your attention – or maybe not.


Matthew Harrington is probably best known for his contributions to various Man-Kzin War anthologies, and for his collaboration with Larry Niven, The Goliath Stone, which is an amusing story about nanobots, human evolution, space exploration, and a few other things. He has an anthology out, The Original Uncut SOUL SURVIVOR: and other stories in which he displays not just the quirky humor in evidence from his other works, but tenderness, passion, and a few other things you might not have expected if all you’d seen were the aforementioned stories about Kzin and mad scientists. Most anthologies, I’m happy if half the stories are good; this one runs considerably higher than that, and is a steal for $4 on the Kindle. Buy it now before he or his agent recover their senses! Better yet, borrow it first from the Amazon Prime Lending Library, and then buy it so he gets a double dip of royalties. 😉

In David Drake’s most recent RCN novel, The Sea Without a Shore, Adele Mundy moves beyond being the Deadliest Librarian in the Universe and develops her aristocratic/diplomatic talents to solve what at first seems like an impossible set of tasks, even for the Unstoppable Force of Daniel Leary and his signals officer. If Drake ever stops writing these, I may have to start reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels, which I understand they’re modeled on.

Also worth your time is an oldie but goodie, Steven Brust’s Brokedown Palace (no relation to the drug movie of the same name) which is an offshoot of his Vlad Taltos novels, which I started reading and then stopped for no good reason I can remember. Anyhow, it’s an interesting fantasy about four princes living in a decaying palace in an out-of-the-way kingdom, and well worth your time.

And then there’s Robert Conroy’s 1920: America’s Great War. This account of a German/Mexican invasion of California and Texas gets 4/5 from Amazon reviewers, but it left me cold; individually, each of the factors that leads to the book’s conclusion are plausible, but when you lump them all together, it blew out the suspension on my disbelief. Too many things go right at just the right time, and even the things that go wrong turn out not to be so bad in the end.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a Single Bypass Burger, or maybe two. Pictures will be posted in the burger post later this week. 🙂


Category: Books

Call Me Old-Fashioned, But …

Posted on | June 3, 2014 | 48 Comments

. . . as the father of six children, the standard method of procreation has always seemed to me both efficient and fun.

Others, however, consider the natural way of baby-making to be too messy and unscientific, and so Progress demands a Brave New World of “reproductive technology,” about which Alexis Madigral of The Atlantic enthusiastically cheers. Synthetic gametes? Excuse my skepticism, Doctor Frankenstein, but I still prefer the messy natural way.

 

Category: Science, Sex

Victor Davis Hanson Nails It

Posted on | June 3, 2014 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Obama uses a host of emphatics (e.g., Period!, Let me be clear!, Make no mistake about it!) precisely because he seeks to accomplish in speech what he cannot do in fact.

Part of the recovery process for this country will be a renewed emphasis on seeing sermons, rather than hearing them.

Category: Barack Obama

‘Like a Plot Twist in a Faulkner Novel’

Posted on | June 3, 2014 | 25 Comments

ITAWAMBA COUNTY, Mississippi
Working from an enormous cabin in the middle of a 37-acre forest, it feels like I’m in a remote wilderness, although I’m actually just 15 miles from Tupelo. Our accommodations Monday night were graciously provided by a local Tea Party lady who knows Ali Akbar, and the mailing address here is Mantachie (population 1,107), but we’re outside the city limits, so the evocative “Itawamba County” was obviously a more appropriate dateline for my latest column:

State Sen. Chris McDaniel finished up an early morning campaign stop Monday by urging his supporters to “push like you’ve never pushed before” to get voters to the polls in Tuesday’s Republican primary. Polls show the Tea Party-backed challenger is neck-and-neck with incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran and turnout will be the decisive factor in a bitterly contested GOP fight that has drawn national attention.
“If we can unseat a 42-year incumbent, it will send shock waves through this country,” McDaniel told about 40 of his supporters who turned out for a breakfast meeting at Chick-fil-A in Tupelo.
The shock waves of a McDaniel victory would be a rebuke not only to the Republican establishment that has poured millions into Cochran’s re-election effort, but also to pundits who have been trying to write the obituary of the Tea Party movement. Regardless of the outcome Tuesday, the united effort of grassroots conservatives in the Mississippi primary have shown that the Tea Party is still very much alive, lifting up McDaniel — a young state senator previously unknown outside his district — to fight a down-to-the-wire campaign against a powerful incumbent with universal statewide name recognition. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

Today we’ve got a four-hour drive back to Hattiesburg for what we hope will be a victory celebration tonight. Your prayers are most certainly welcome and, of course: Hit the freaking tip jar!

 

 

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Category: Election, Mississippi, Shoe Leather Fund, Tea Party

Can Chris McDaniel Close the Deal?

Posted on | June 2, 2014 | 47 Comments

TUPELO, Mississippi
About 40 supporters showed up at 8 a.m. to greet Chris McDaniel at Chick-fil-A here in one of the final stops of the conservative challenger’s campaign before Tuesday’s Republican primary.

“If we can unseat a 42-year incumbent, it will send shock waves through this country,” McDaniel told his supporters, encouraging them to “push like you’ve never pushed before” to drive turnout. And make no mistake: Turnout will decide the fate of that “42-year incumbent,” Sen. Thad Cochran. The latest polls show the race neck-and-neck, but the most important number is that no poll shows Cochran over 45% and, as every political professional knows, incumbents under 50% usually lose.

The fact that Chris McDaniel may be on the verge of victory in Mississippi is enormously frustrating to liberal Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who can’t understand why the Cochran campaign couldn’t use the Weirdest Political Scandal Ever™ to sink McDaniel:

In short, Cochran’s team really should have been able to use this to bury McDaniel. And somehow they haven’t. Amazingly, McDaniel seems to have suffered little if any damage from it. The internals of the GOP poll clearly show that the reaction to the incident has been negative and that, when asked, people say it’s made them less likely to support McDaniel. But it just doesn’t seem to show through in the topline numbers.
Maybe Cochran’s time is just up. Perhaps the most telling number in the survey is “Do you support the goals and ideals of the Tea Party?” 55% say yes, 21% say no. That’s a very good number for McDaniel to work with.

Indeed, if a majority of Tuesday’s primary voters support the Tea Party, then McDaniel should win. After McDaniel’s event here at Chick-fil-A, Ali Akbar and I had a long talk with Tupelo Tea Party leader Grant Sowell. Like other McDaniel supporters, Sowell views the scandal — wherein a pro-McDaniel blogger sneaked into a nursing home to get video of Cochran’s invalid wife — as an unfortunate distraction from the real issues of the campaign. But speaking of real issues, there was (and is) a genuine scandal which the misguided bumbling blogger Clayton Kelly was trying to document, i.e.: Cochran’s relationship with his executive assistant Kay Webber.

No reporter in the mainstream media — either in Mississippi or nationally — will touch this story, although it seems to be something of an open secret that Cochran and Webber are living together in D.C., while Cochran’s wife vegetates in a nursing home. Matthew Boyle has reported that Webber accompanied Cochran on 33 foreign trips, so that we have the shameless spectacle of a married Republican senator abandoning his invalid wife and traveling the world with his reputed girlfriend.

And that, my friends, is a real scandal.

So if Josh Marshall or anyone else wonders why the Cochran campaign was unable to use the Clayton Kelly escapade to destroy McDaniel, the answer is: They couldn’t, because any serious reporting on the story would raise questions about Cochran’s rumored relationship with Webber. However, if somehow Cochran survives in Tuesday’s primary, then and only then would the mainstream media take a serious interest in that story. But I digress . . .

The real story is what Chris McDaniel said this morning to his supporters here at Chick-fil-A: “The most conservative state in the country needs the most conservative senator in the country” — and by any measure, Thad Cochran falls short of that goal.

Voters have been bombarded with a barrage of TV ads and, as usual in this kind of “nationalized” election — where big money and big media have swooped down on the state — most people are tired of the negativity and mudslinging and they’re just ready for it to be over.

Some of the naysayers in the comments on last night’s post were skeptical of McDaniel’s chances, but this election will hinge on turnout, and if Republican voters in Mississippi take their civic duty seriously, all the media spin and GOP Establishment money won’t be enough to save Thad Cochran. Pray for a McDaniel victory.

 

 

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Category: Election, Mississippi
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