The Other McCain

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Bostic Campaign ‘Surging’ Before Runoff?

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 21 Comments

Volunteers at Curtis Bostic campaign headquarters make phone calls Friday

CHARLESTON, S.C.
What a way to celebrate Easter Sunday — out on the campaign trail. Well, it’s better than a Cesar Chavez tribute, I suppose.

The fact that the 1st District runoff will occur on the Tuesday after Easter adds an extra element of uncertainty to the outcome, because many people will be on vacation, which will likely mean an even lower turnout. Slightly more than 50,000 cast ballots in the March 19 GOP primary, about 20,000 of them for Mark Sanford and 7,000 for Curtis Bostic. Exactly how many of the 33,000 who voted for the 14 other candidates will show up Tuesday and — who they will vote for — is a mystery. A Daily Kos report Friday wondered if the race was shifting against Sanford:

Is Curtis Bostic surging at the last possible moment? He and Mark Sanford, his Republican runoff opponent, met on Thursday night for their only debate, and surprisingly, Sanford went on the attack. (So did Bostic, over Sanford’s infamous misdeeds while governor, but you expect the underdog to do that.) Sanford went after Bostic for voting in favor of spending increases while serving on the Charleston County Council, and also criticized his attendance record.
The fact that Stanford wasn’t content to play nice just days before Tuesday’s election is noteworthy in and of itself, but here’s an added twist: Sanford may have seriously stepped in it. Bostic says his absences from the council “were related to his wife’s battle with cancer.” Ouch.

How many voters are even aware of that debate gaffe? Will it make a difference? It’s hard to tell. A head-to-head match-up between Sanford and Bostic, based on a poll taken before the March 19 primary, showed Sanford leading by 13 points.

Since then, however, Bostic has appeared in two debates opposite Sanford, has run a new TV ad, and has sent out campaign mailers that describe him as a “fiscally conservative leader we can trust.” This, in addition to endorsements by Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter and former Rep. Henry Brown, who represented the 1st District for a decade. That’s probably what “surging” looks like, and one South Carolina blog cites a “source within the Democrat Party” as saying that their own polling shows a “very tight race” in the runoff.

UPDATE: Photos illustrating the campaign (click to enlarge):


The full-color mailer the Bostic campaign sent to Republican voters on Friday. Another mailer is scheduled to hit local mailboxes on Monday.

Headlines in the Charleston Post and Courier from Friday, Saturday and Sunday show how the local paper is covering the runoff.

UPDATE II: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power — thanks! — and you can see the full-page newspaper ad that Mark Sanford’s campaign ran today. For some reason, neither Sanford’s ex-wife nor his fiancée is pictured in the ad.

UPDATE III: Headline at the Summerville (S.C.) Patch:

Social Media Analysis Predicts Bostic Win Tuesday

Hmmm. Wonder how that happened . . .

UPDATE IV: Mark Sanford’s sister is worried and sent an e-mail:

I’ve heard from as far away as Greenville (a huge evangelical church there from which the Bostic Campaign has requested phone calls and additional vans) exactly what the Bostic Campaign is doing. They are working in many evangelical churches, and they have the respective church leaderships organizing vanloads of their parishioners going to the Board of Elections all this week to vote early. They’re keeping the vans through Election Day next Tuesday. In Beaufort, they are working with several large churches — one is the Community Bible Church in Shell Point (a man I know there said he was going to vote for another candidate in the primary, but had been told directly by his pastor to vote for Bostic.) There are lots of others of these very large churches up in Charleston, Mount Pleasant, and North Charleston that they’re working with as well.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, the irrepressible Will Folks responds to my description of him as a “narcissistic sociopath.” Small egos are rare in politics.

 


 

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Category: South Carolina

FMJRA 2.0: No Bicycles

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The 1% Progressive Bloggers Club and the Bourgeois Dialectic of Comrade Yglesias

Why John Avlon Hates Sarah Palin

Headin’ to South Cackalacky!

‘The Dream Is Dead’

The Other War on Women, or: It’s Not Harassment When Democrats Do It

How Franklin Foer Fired Timothy Noah

‘You Better Back It Up’: Security Guard Tasers Aggressive Woman on Video

FMJRA 2.0: March Madness

Rule 5 Sunday: Time After Time

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.25.13

#TrustCurtis @Bostic4Congress Campaign Has Eight Days to Stop Sanford in S.C.

Syria: It’s Complicated. Also, It Sucks.

Headline Contrast

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.26.13

South Carolina ‘Cash Money’ Loyalty

‘We Record What Is to All Known’

The Power of Prejudice

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.27.13

Can the Shoe Leather Fund Send Me to South Carolina? O, Ye of Little Faith!

The Fanatic Disciples of Equality

Vote Democrat! ‘Your Slave-Holding, Murdering, Adulterous, Baby-Raping, Incestuous, Snaggle-Toothed, Backward-A**ed, Inbreed, Imported Criminal-Minded Kin Folk’

Gold Price Jumps — Unexpectedly! — as Cyprus Tries to Halt Capital Flight

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.28.13

Greetings from Charleston! Debate Between Bostic and Sanford 7 p.m. ET UPDATE: BOSTIC WINS DEBATE

South Carolina Debate Aftermath

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (13 the hard way)
  2. Da Tech Guy (5)

Bunch of folks who just missed the cutoff this week, and a bunch of first-time linkers. Stick around, folks! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, April 5.


 

Category: FMJRA Award

Obama Hasn’t ‘Evolved’ That Far … Yet

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 12 Comments

Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services requested public comment on a proposal to provide taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery, but scrubbed the proposal off their Web site as soon as it was reported by news agencies. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air understands the Obama-logic:

Congress has been arguing over how to limit the current Medicare/Medicaid systems to keep them from going broke and taking the American economic system with them.  Some genius at HHS thinks this is the most propitious moment to talk about sticking taxpayers with sex-change surgery bills?
Smooth move.  But don’t think for a moment this won’t come back later, either.

Of course not: Under the radical dispensation, that which is not forbidden is mandatory, and to say that someone has a “right” to do something will be interpreted to mean that taxpayers are obligated to pay them to do it. This is what the entire fight about “marriage equality” is about: Granting same-sex couples access to whatever government benefits married couples get.

Our national motto has been changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “What’s In It For Me?”

There is no real opposition to people cohabiting, having wedding ceremonies and calling their unions “marriages” — live and let live, whatever floats your boat — but there is understandable resistance to government action that requires us to treat such pairings as perfect analogs of man and wife. In addition to any traditional moral objections, there is the suspicion that this sort of radical “equality” will end up costing taxpayers money and restricting individual freedom. And one individual freedom that is already being eroded is the right to express traditional moral objections, so that the Family Research Council can be stigmatized as a “hate group” and targeted for terrorism by the sans-culottes of the new Jacobinism.

Remember: Sandra Fluke argued that it is “discrimination” for insurers not to cover sex-change surgery and, last year, a federal judge invoked the Eighth Amendment in ruling that Robert Kosilek, imprisoned for murdering his wife in 1990, has a constitutional right to a  taxpayer-funded sex-change. My reaction at the time:

The Eight Amendment? If a convicted murderer doesn’t have a vagina, that’s “cruel and unusual punishment”? As strange as this sounds, it is entirely logical if you accept the premise of sexual “rights” as understood by liberals.

Please read (or re-read) “The Problem With Sexual Rights.” We are traveling a road paved with weird intentions.

 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Culture, Sex

Mayor Bloomberg’s Sexy Teen App

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 5 Comments

New Yorkers are so sophisticated, aren’t they?

The Bloomberg administration has launched an app intended to reduce teen pregnancy called “Teens in NYC Protection+” that provides a wealth of health data for kids who are — or are thinking about becoming — sexually active, The Post has learned.
Information about everything from free clinics for HIV and STD testing to receiving condoms and emergency contraception is just a touch away on a smartphone. . . .
Parents who visit the site are in for a surprising lesson about state law.
“Teens in New York state have a legal right to get sexual-health services without the permission of parents, guardians, boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives or anyone else,” the site advises.
By comparison, a teen is not allowed to go on a school trip without parental consent. . . .
“While the percent of high-school teens who have had sex declined by 26 percent over the last 10 years, there are more than 19,000 teen pregnancies each year and most — 87 percent — are unintended,” the Health Department said.

Perhaps teens would not be so careless if they didn’t have a gigantic Nanny State welfare apparatus constantly ready to intervene between them and responsibility. The helplessness of the populace — who presumably can neither pay for their own condoms nor find where to get them free without a special smart-phone app — becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start with the assumption that people are in constant need of guidance and aid from government, then spend millions to provide such “help,” you will eventually produce a certain clientele who are as helpless as you thought them to be.

Mankind survived for thousands of years without smart-phone apps to tell teenagers where to get free condoms. I’m not sure how long we can survive Bloomberg-ism.

Also, isn’t the description of teenagers “who are — or are thinking about becoming — sexually active” kind of all-inclusive? I mean, what teenager doesn’t think about becoming sexually active? What did we do before we had an app for that?

 

Category: New York, Sex

World’s Youngest Blogger:
The Cuteman Cometh

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 14 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Will Folks: ‘My Sacred Honor Requires Me to Endorse DCCC Fundraising Poster Boy’

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 20 Comments

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Surely everyone remembers how the gallant gentleman Will Folks tried to derail Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign by asserting that “his sacred honor” required him to claim that he had a sexual affair with her when he worked as a political consultant to her.

And now Folks, whose career in South Carolina politics included a stint as press secretary to Mark Sanford, employs his bizarre habit of first-person plural references to himself — “our founding editor” — to provide an “unenthused” endorsement to his former boss in Tuesday’s primary runoff. In the 16-candidate GOP primary, Folks had endorsed state Sen. Larry Grooms, who finished third behind Curtis Bostic on March 19.

In the Byzantine world of South Carolina politics, a corrupt cesspool of power-crazed backstabbers that is to Republicans what Chicago is to Democrats, Folks is a local legend. He went from playing bass in a rock band to working for Sanford, but got thrown under the bus in an ugly scandal; some still insist Folks was the victim of a “honey trap” set-up.

The subject of Will Folks came up over dinner with sources Friday at R.B.’s Seafood (where I had grilled flounder with hushpuppies, fries and collard greens to die for). One veteran South Carolina politico told me that Folks is dangerous because he is loyal to no one: “He’s his own man.” My observation that Folks seems like a narcissistic sociopath drew only a shrug in response. Evidently, narcissistic sociopaths are so commonplace in GOP politics here that nobody even notices.

Are these people indifferent to the public interest, or just blind to the downside risk of backing Sanford? Having seen the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in more than a few special elections, I think South Carolina Republicans might be underestimating what kind of political hell is about to be unleashed on the 1st District. Sure, Cook rates it R+11, but when the entirety of the Democrat machinery concentrates on one district — and keep in mind, OFA has got nothing better to do between now and the May 7 special election — it’s hard to say that any district is “safe.” Plus, there’s the fact that Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch (who’s raised $3 million for the race) has a celebrity-media connection.

While the Sanford forces talk about “redemption” and “forgiveness,” the unforgiving Democrats will make his past a national issue — reviving the “war on women” meme — which is why Ann Coulter endorsed Curtis Bostic:

Already polls show Sanford tied with, or losing to, the Democratic nominee. MSNBC has barely been able to conceal its glee. This is one they hadn’t even counted on!
Win or lose, MSNBC will be able to gloat nonstop about Republicans being a Party of the serial adulterers. So it’s win-win-win for the Democrats.
There’s no “win” for the GOP with Sanford, except that Mark Sanford is bored and no one will hire him. So the country has to take one for the team — Team Sanford!
The country is important, but Mark Sanford thinks his redemption is more important.

Of course, the Sanford campaign is doing a “kitchen sink” attack on Bostic, accusing him of everything from RINO-dom to international human trafficking, in order to create the idea that Bostic — a Marine veteran and married father of five — is as scandalous as the Appalachian Trail hiker.

Will voters here join the gallant gentleman Will Folks in backing Mark Sanford? Or will they rally behind Curtis Bostic?

 

Category: South Carolina

#SC01 UPDATE: Mark Sanford Cites His Vote for DOMA in Local TV Roundtable

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 8 Comments

Campaign signs outside Thursday’s debate venue

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford cited his vote for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) during a TV appearance with Republican rival Curtis Bostic, three days before their runoff in the 1st District special congressional election.

Appearing in a televised half-hour debate Saturday morning on Charleston NBC affiliate WCBD-TV’s “Beyond the Headlines” program, both Bostic and Sanford expressed their opposition to same-sex marriage. Sanford, who represented the 1st District for three terms beginning in 1995, referred to his own 1996 vote for DOMA, which President Clinton signed into law.

“I think that ultimately, you know, marriage is a sacrament and, you know, it is something that is ultimately in the purview of faith rather than civil authority,” said Sanford, whose 2009 sex scandal resulted in his own divorce, as well as a censure by the state legislature and a $74,000 ethics fine. “I voted, when  I was in the United States Congress, for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. It is not say, tragically, that every marriage makes it, but that this is the ideal we ought to be aiming for.”

DOMA was the subject of a Supreme Court hearing Wednesday, with several justices voicing skepticism about its constitutionality. In Saturday’s TV forum, Bostic called for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman under federal law.

 


 

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Category: Congress, Election, Gays, Marriage, South Carolina

Why Did Those Racist Crackers at CNN Keep Roland Martin From Being a Star?

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 18 Comments

Just by way of historical context, let’s remember that CNN was a trailblazer in this regard, making Bernard Shaw their primetime news anchor back in 1980. Keep that in mind in appraising the sour grapes rationalization by axed commentator Roland Martin:

Roland Martin on Thursday blamed racism for his inability to get his own show  at CNN.
“You have largely white male executives who are not necessarily enamored  with the idea of having strong, confident minorities, who say, ‘You know, I can  do this,'” he told HuffPostLive.
“I am simply saying ‘give folks a shot,’” he added. “We deliver, but we never get the big piece, the larger salary, to be able to get from here to there.”

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: CNN
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