The Other McCain

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

Unpopular Former Republican Governor Endorses Unpopular Democrat President

Posted on | August 26, 2012 | 12 Comments

TAMPA, Florida
Charlie Crist, who lost the 2010 Senate campaign to Marco Rubio, publishes his endorsement on the editorial page of today’s Tampa Bay Times:

As America prepares to pick our president for the next four years — and as Florida prepares once again to play a decisive role — I’m confident that President Barack Obama is the right leader for our state and the nation.

“Corrupt” wouldn’t fit in the headline, but it’s not like we’ve forgotten all the shenanigans alleged against former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist by his former handpicked state party chairman, who has since been indicted on federal corruption charges. More importantly, however, Crist represents no constituency other than himself.

In the 2010 Senate election, Crist ran as a sore-loser independent after it became obvious Rubio would win the GOP nomination. Exit polls showed that not only did Rubio overwhelmingly win the Republican vote (87% to 12% for Crist), but Rubio also won among independent voters (51% to 38%). Charlie is an “independent” who doesn’t appeal to independents, and actually got most of his votes from Democrats.

UPDATE: Da Tech Guy was reminded of another sore loser, Dede Scozzafava, while Glenn Reynolds was reminded that, in September 2009, Charlie Crist was predicting that Obama would be a one-term president.

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Florida

New Romney Ad Quotes Obama

Posted on | August 26, 2012 | 8 Comments

TAMPA, Florida
Barack Obama became president by attacking what have since become his own policies. In 2008, candidate Obama accused John McCain of planning “drastic cuts in Medicare, $882 billion worth.” President Obama has cut $716 billion from MediCare to pay for ObamaCare, as the Mitt Romney campaign reminds voters in a new ad:

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Health Care, Mitt Romney

Monday GOP Convention Schedule Postponed Due to Anticipated BlogBash Hangovers and Approaching Hurricane …

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 15 Comments

. . . but mainly, yeah, it was the hurricane:

Republicans announced Saturday that they had effectively canceled the first day of its convention for safety concerns associated with an impending hurricane.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement that “the Republican National Convention will convene on Monday August 27th and immediately recess until Tuesday afternoon, August 28th.”That move essentially postpones the activities of the first of four scheduled days of the convention. But Priebus said in a conference call with reporters that the details of the revised schedule were not yet settled, and could be announced as soon as Sunday.
“The Republican National Convention is going to take place. We know that we will officially nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” he said.

Ali Akbar and I learned the news this evening while we were attending a reception at the fabulous mansion where Sunday night the National Bloggers Club will be hosting Blog Bash.

The political ramifications were immediately obvious: With no official convention business Monday, Republicans will be free to party all night Sunday, and so this will certainly be the most off-the-hook Blog Bash in the history of off-the-hook Blog Bashes.

A little bit of actual news: I called one of my sources with the Romney campaign and suggested we get together, but he explained that he was “in the candidate’s hotel,” which is under a draconian security lockdown for the duration of the convention. Basically, you’ve got to give the Secret Service a DNA sample to get anywhere near Mitt’s hotel.

Also, I had an interesting conversation — and by “interesting conversation,” of course, I mean dreadful embarrassment — at this evening’s reception while talking to the chairwoman of the convention’s Platform Committee, Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Someone at the reception had told me that the youngest member of the Platform Committee, a girl from Alabama, had gotten a lot of publicity, and so I asked Congresswoman Blackburn about this.

Eh . . . wrong question.

Exactly why this was the wrong question, I didn’t quite understand at the time, until I got back to our Ybor City condo and Googled the story:

[D]elegates to the Republican National Convention met [Thursday] in Tampa, Florida, to finalize the party’s platform on various controversial issues, including abortion, with the youngest member of the platform committee, Jackie Curtiss, 22, having the most to say.
Staunchly anti-abortion, Curtiss objected to an amendment to the platform banning medication “that terminates human life after conception.” The amendment aims to outlaw “abortion pills,” as they are sometimes called, which could, Curtiss worried, potentially include the “morning after pill.” Curtiss emphasized that platform needed to make it clear that the Republican party is welcoming to women, and that such extreme positions could be alienating. Curtiss was also the only person in attendance who referred to Rep. Todd Akin by name, despite the ongoing media attention devoted to his ignorant comments about “forcible rape” and incidences of pregnancy.
“I think it’s a huge issue. I think you can tell that by all the Republican candidates coming out in opposition to him,” she said. “We don’t need to get hung up on him, but we also don’t need to support policies that mirror his.”

My faux-pas in mentioning this to Congresswoman Blackburn was an error committed in honest ignorance, but my explanation won’t help me any more than Todd Akin’s explanations have helped him — which is to say, not at all. After embarrassing myself with this stupid gaffe, I sort of backed away apologetically and exited the room.

No point even trying to dig myself out of that hole, eh?

At any rate, let’s hope my dreadful blunder will be forgiven (if not forgotten) tomorrow afternoon when I cover the Her New View panel discussion at the Straz Performing Arts Center here in Tampa: Dana Loesch, Katie Pavlich, Rep. Blackburn, Rep. Renee Ellmers, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will participate in the 5 p.m. event, and afterwards we’ll depart to Blog Bash.

Hurricane? Who’s afraid of a hurricane?

Category: Fear and Loathing at the Republican National Convention

Salute To Neil Armstrong

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

May Heaven rest Neil Armstrong. His secular immortality is assured. I’d just like to point out that, like the majority of astronauts, he was a Naval aviator. Navy: come for the service, stay for the chance to impact history. “I remain unvanquished,” indeed.


So, this November, remember: only one of the two candidates is likely to put America again on course to do something as sack-adelic as the Apollo program.

Neil Armstrong

Triumphantly treading titanium testicle territory ‘ternally

Category: Blogging

Let The GOP Airbrushing Begin

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

The Franklin Center points to Florida Watchdog:

The many months of attempting to find the “anti-Romney,” the candidate without a large state government health care plan or a more liberal governing record in his past, seem to have been unsuccessful.
As foretold by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in November 2011, the political press at that time was ready to commit to nearly a year of avoiding Romney’s ‘inevitability,’ engaging in an “extended masquerade, designed to persuade credulous readers and excitable viewers that the Republican presidential nomination is actually up for grabs.”

Masquerade, my right big toe. Every single day had to be played out, and it’s pure hooey to pretend otherwise:

  • Romney could well have imploded, a la Akin. Still could.
  • The base had to be identified, and persuaded to get off the couch.
  • The issues had to be identified, publicly mensurated, and sorted.

Anybody who says that, without the nomination process as a whole, Romney would not have arrived at Paul Ryan as VP pick is really doing a disservice. The primary votes were cast (I didn’t vote for Romney in the VA primary) and those results were important information for decision making upstream.

In summary, I reject all this: “your voice doesn’t matter, it’s all decided by the power brokers” noise. Pure disinformatzya. Keep an eye on anybody circulating it.

Category: GOP

Nugent Sticking To His Guns

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Newsmax:

Second-Amendment champion and rocker Ted Nugent expressed outrage at the shootings outside New York’s iconic Empire State Building on Friday, but pointed to the tragedy as a failure of gun control.

Money quote:

“Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless. Everyone dead at Virginia Tech was unarmed and helpless,” Nugent told Newsmax in an earlier interview this month. “How dare the president or Nancy Pelosi, or Bloomberg want more of that?”

ICYMI, here is the Nuge telling Piers Morgan a thing or two about gun control’s inefficacy:

via Mike Gaukin

Update: linked at Hogewash and WWTFT.

Category: New York

Racism Industrial Complex Training Film: “Bob Is A Racist”

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

This country in general, and this blog in particular, cannot stop in its relentless quest for ‘fairness’, and a raaaaacism-free country.
Sadly, it appears that Bob Belvedere has been outed as a raaaaacist by the Solipsist Piffle Legal CanYouNameTerrorists (SPLC):

Next up on the list to be outed, apparently, are Troglopundit and American Glob. It’s all about the children, you see.

On a related note, Althouse explains the mental gymnastics required to view mention of a birth certificate as a raaaaacist statement:

To see it as racist, you have to have a background belief that to think of someone as a natural-born citizen is to think of him as white.

Ah, so! Connecting the dots in that fashion, the picture would start to resemble a bodily orifice.

Video via Ace and Ed Driscoll.

Category: Ace of Spades, Camp of the Saints, Ed Driscoll, Troglopundit

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Fear, Loathing and Deficient Hygiene

Posted on | August 25, 2012 | 15 Comments

TAMPA, Florida
We were cruising down U.S. 301 somewhere south of Hawthorne in the pre-dawn gloom, congratulating ourselves on having made good time on our long drive to the Republican National Convention when we saw a sight that inspired panic in our hearts.

There, lurking in the fog beside the highway, were three large deer.

Terror on four hooves.

Braking instantly, I slowed to 40 mph and Ali Akbar said, “Damn. I tried to yell ‘stop,’ but I couldn’t say anything.”

Indeed, we had both been momentarily paralyzed by fear. We were in that weird state of hypomanic delirium caused by sleep deprivation and excessive caffeine intake — too excited to sleep, too tired to think — and our mental acuity had begun rapidly degrading.

Had the deer actually tried to run in front of the KIA, we would have been doomed by my slow reflexes, dulled by exhaustion.

But the deer just stood and watched us roll past.

An omen? Maybe.

We arrived early in Tampa. The condo Ali has rented for the week won’t be ready until 11 a.m., so we had three hours to kill — and we reeked.

A long overnight road trip inevitably results in, well, hygiene issues. Ali had taken a shower before we left his apartment, so he wasn’t too bad, but I hadn’t shaved or showered since Thursday night.  By 8 a.m. Saturday, I didn’t look much like an award-winning journalist and smelled a lot like a hobo or, even worse, an Occupy protester. Speaking of which, here’s the front-page story from today’s Tampa Bay Times:

First encounter of protesters,
police will set tone for RNC
TAMPA — The first contact between police and Republican National Convention protesters is two days away. What happens Monday in downtown Tampa may well determine the success or failure of the entire week.
So say law enforcement experts who have studied large-scale political events that have spun out of control. Four years ago in St. Paul, Minn., police skirmished with protesters on the first day and never relaxed their riot-prevention mode. By week’s end, they had arrested more than 800 people.
“It’s too easy if a police department isn’t appropriately trained . . . to deal with protests in an offensive manner,” said Sam Rosenfeld, a security expert with the Densus Group in Plano, Texas. “To see every threat as a violent threat and to police it as such. If they have discipline and the self-control, it won’t escalate unless justified.”
The situation here is complicated by the low expectations that police and protesters have of each other. Recent reports of stockpiled bricks, ominous Internet videos, possible attempts by anarchists to shut down bridges and what protesters perceive as low-grade harassment have put both sides on edge. . . .

Read the whole thing. Clearly, Tampa police will need to employ maximum violence to suppress these dangerous anarchists. Crack a few heads with the riot batons, launch a few tear-gas grenades and if that doesn’t work . . . Well, one hesitates to suggest what further methods might be needed to maintain public order.

After all, Tampa is also bracing for Hurricane Isaac, and who knows what lawless chaos these protesters might unleash upon the innocent citizenry amid a hurricane-induced emergency? Best to take no chances: Shoot first, and ask questions later.

Did I mention that I’ve been awake for the past 27 hours? That I’ve probably consumed two gallons of coffee during that time? A man in my condition is apt to be a bit irritable, and a man who drives more than 900 miles to cover a political convention deserves something truly newsworthy: A couple dozen protesters beaten bloody by Tampa police — yeah, that’s what I’d call “news.”

While I’ve been sitting here indulging my weary imagination, Ali has been working on the details for Blog Bash, scheduled for Sunday evening at a mansion here in Tampa. The original plan was for about 60 people, but 165 people have RSVP’d. It’s the hottest ticket in town, with political VIPs and media celebrities on the guest list. If you’re gonna be in Tampa for the convention and haven’t RSVP’d yet, please be advised that you’d better get in touch with Ali Akbar immediately, and be prepared to beg.

Speaking of begging: Please don’t forget to hit the tip jar.

Ali Akbar works at the National Affairs Desk in Tampa, 9:30 a.m.

Well, it’s now about time to leave McDonald’s, head to the condo to take a long-overdue shower — and a nap.

 





Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing at the Republican National Convention
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