Rick Santorum Crashes Blog Bash, Impresses Conservative New Media

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Rick Santorum answers questions at Blog Bash party Friday in Charleston, S.C.
At left is Alice Linahan, who arranged his attendance at the event.

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a surprise appearance Friday night at an invitation-only party for conservative New Media, drinking beer, eating pizza and taking questions from bloggers and talk radio hosts.

Santorum answered on-the-record questions from many of the party attendees, including Tony Katz of All Patriots Media, Craig Robinson of TheIowaRepublican.com, Caleb Howe of Red State and Javier Manjarres of the Shark Tank, who asked Santorum about the controversy surrounding an ABC News interview with Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife:

Javier Manjarres: “You being a social conservative, do you think his past personal issues with social conservatives?”
Rick Santorum: “You have to ask social conservatives on that. The national media has been despicable in what they have done to me over the past 15 or 20 years, and what they’re doing to me right now, as you all know. These are lowlifes who dig up everything to try to undercut you and take you off your game and distract away from the real issues we’re dealing with. What you do in your public life and what you do while you’re in public life, to me, is fair game. Some of these things Newt did when he was Speaker and in public life and that, to me, is a fair-game issue. That subject [Gingrich’s divorce] is one thing. Getting into the salacious details is quite a different thing and, to me, out of bounds. “

The party, sponsored by Ali Akbar’s Blog Bash organization, was held at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel that is media headquarters for the Southern Republican Leaadership Conference which is meeting this weekend in Charleston. Santorum’s attendance at the event was arranged by Alice Linahan of Voices Empower.

UPDATE: Santorum’s answers on issues and discussion of his campaign strategy were solid, but what impressed the bloggers in attendance was his accessibility and relaxed demeanor. Few bloggers have had a chance to see Santorum outside of debates and campaign appearances.

Santorum arrived at the party — having been next door in the Fox News temporary studio for an interview with Sean Hannity — with his wife Karen and daughter Sarah, as well as several staffers, volunteers and supporters. Santorum helped himself to pizza, chicken tenders and a Blue Moon Ale. Before he could eat, however, several bloggers insisted on interviewing him.

After answering their questions, Santorum sat down to eat and was joined at his table by pollster Dick Morris, who had also been at the Fox News temporary studio at the Marriott. Several bloggers captured their conversation on camera, and continued asking questions, which Santorum answered. He went back for seconds at the buffet — getting three more slices of pizza and a Sam Adams Boston Lager.

UPDATE II: Bryan Preston of PJ Media has more about Santorum’s appearance at Friday’s blog party. During the event, Santorum was endorsed by conservative voter-integrity activist Anita Montrcrief, who blew the whistle on ACORN.

I’ll try to get more video and photos online after a while.

Mitt Romney Needs More Lessons From Chris Christie

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by Smitty

The 2012 election is not an episode of Leave it to Beaver:Concluding the rebuttal with “You’re wrong!” is about an order of magnitude below the intensity needed. Let’s leave the Ward Cleaver routine on the sundeck by the pool, shall we? Suggested response:

“This country was founded in Liberty. Do you speak it? You should feel free to get yourself into the 1%, if you choose. And if you cannot, because the government of President 1% Obama has blocked your way, you need to direct your energy into either running for office yourself, and improving the situation, or voting for me, who knows extremely well how to fix the situation. Finger pointing is beneath real Americans.”

via American Power

Two Words In Reply To Stare Decisis On Progressivism, The Second Of Which Is ‘You’

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by Smitty

Can we get a spine implant for Orin Kerr (emphasis original)?

I’m also a Burkean conservative stare decisis guy, and I’m acutely aware of the Supreme Court’s long struggle to identify principled and workable limits on the scope of the Commerce Clause. History has shown that it’s surprisingly hard to do that, and that unprincipled or unstable lines don’t last and just destabilize the law for a short window before being rejected. My comfort with the Court striking down the mandate therefore varies considerably based on how the Court could do it. Let’s imagine, hypothetically, that the Supreme Court strikes down the mandate but does not identify any genuinely principled or workable doctrine to justify it. The Court’s decision merely reopens the hornet’s nest of line-drawing problems that the Court has long struggled with in the Commerce Clause setting, with the significant likelihood that in 20 years the Court will abandon its reasoning. In that case, the Burkean conservative part of me would be dismayed by the Court’s decision. Sure, the federalism guy side of me would be happy, but it would be outweighed by my Burkean objections. But if we imagine a hypothetical opinion invalidating the mandate that did identify such a principle, and the principle proves a lasting one, then my Burkean concerns could be addressed and my reaction would be different.

A century ago, the Wilson administration hijacked our Constitution, and effected a slow-motion Article V re-write thereof. These many trillions of dollars of debt later, stare decisis amounts to ‘staring at the deceased’, i.e. our liberty. False ideas are not rendered true by trotting them out gradually, sir.

Step up to the plate, and understand that Amendments 16 & 17, plus the Federal Reserve Act, were the seeds. The New Deal and Great Society fed and watered Leviathan. And now the time has come to ensure that the SCOTUS notes that liberty has been substantially harmed by the last century of “Progress”, and does something more in keeping with the American exceptionalism. This ‘Burkean conservative’ concern trolling is worthy of faux conservative clowns like David Brooks.

That the government can tax me to support, and I cannot sue for emancipation from, this horrid Social Security beast is all we need to know about the fecklessness of stare decisis arguments. I hope that the decision that slays ObamaCare lays the foundation for a restoration of individual liberty.

Update: now a Memeorandum thread.

Banning Traffic Cameras

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by Smitty

Insty’s link on Iowa banning traffic cameras leads to a subversive thought serious question: why do we have unmarked police cars? In military terms, the idea of having the authorities pose as civilians is a matter of OPDEC. Going undercover makes sense when, say, infiltrating criminal organizations.

Is that an example of overkill, in the common case of the work commute? Or are traffic tickets really part of the business model for police departments?

When elected Benevolent Dictator for Life, I promise to snuff both traffic cameras and unmarked police cars. Put the police bill right out front and center where it should be.

Will Folks: Now His Sacred Honor Compels Him to Gay-Bait … Me?

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CHARLESTON, S.C.
Longtime readers will perhaps need no introduction to Will Folks, the South Carolina political gossip blogger who made himself an infamous laughingstock by claiming to have had an affair with Nikki Haley. The vile human stain whom I dubbed “Deuce Bigalow, Blogger Gigolo” is now supporting Ron Paul — go figure — and when I expressed suspicion about his “Elizabeth Reichert” exclusive, was provoked to a series of Twitter eruptions, including these:


Right: He misspells “please,” while calling me “ignorant.” As I long ago observed, “Will Folks is going to keep this up until his skull has an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with somebody’s tire iron.”

Because bad thing happen to bad people.

UPDATE: In a post at his site, Will Folks engages in his usual annoying distraction technique: Referring to himself in third person as “our founding editor” and “Sic Willie,” while pretending that there was nothing suspicious about either the “Elizabeth Reichert” flyer or his own astonishingly rapid acquisition of the complete text of the flyer.

Keep in mind that the Ron Paul people have been doing dirty tricks — including the use of anonymous flyers — since Iowa. Folks is an admitted supporter of Ron Paul, and this flyer was surreptitiously distributed on the windshields of cars at a pro-life event where the Paulistas were out in force.

So I come out to the parking lot, get the flyer, drive to a McDonald’s to file my American Spectator column and, while I’m at it, decide to Google this “Elizabeth Reichert” to see if such a person exists. And the only reference to her online as of 10 p.m. Wednesday was … Will Folks at FITS News, who had managed not only to transcribe the 388-word flyer, but also to write a 475-word “news” story about it, in which he said, “Allegations are flying among the rival 2012 camps, but at the moment a majority of fingers are being pointed at Perry’s campaign.”

BULLSHIT.

No fingers were “being pointed” at the time he wrote that, because the flyer hadn’t appeared on car windshields at the Greenville Hilton until barely an hour earlier. There had not been enough time for Folks to contact any sources (you’ll notice that no sources were even mentioned, much less named, in his “news” story). Folks lives in Columbia — an hour-and-a-half drive from Greenville — and yet was able to get hold of the text of this flyer and transcribe it in less time than it took me to drive to McDonald’s and log onto their free WiFi.

And to return to my original question: “Who Is Elizabeth Reichert?” Read the Will Folks story and you’ll see he refers to her as a “pro-life activist,” but we have no reason to suppose that she is such an “activist,” if she even exists. Prior to Folks’s reporting of this mysterious flyer, there was no online record of her, certainly not in connection with any sort of pro-life activism.

So: How did Folks get hold of the flyer? Was he in Greenville that night? Three presidential candidates — Santorum, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich — spoke in person at the pro-life forum, while Ron Paul appeared via satellite TV hookup. If Folks was in Greenville to cover that event, where are his reports of those candidates’ appearances? Did he decide that what the candidates said at the forum was less newsworthy than this flyer distributed in the parking lot of the Hilton?

You see what I mean by “suspicious”? One suspects that, unless Folks himself wrote this flyer, it was written by one of his fellow Ron Paul supporters, who informed him in advance and provided him with the text of the flyer by e-mail, so that all he had to do was to cut and paste it and hit the “publish” button the minute his fellow Paulista informed him that the flyer had, in fact, been distributed. And the “fingers pointing at  Perry” riff was just a lie to distract attention from the probable fact that it was Will Folks’s Paulista pals who were responsible for the flyer.

On his own site, Folks is trying to treat these suspicions as a joke, while on his Twitter accounts, he’s calling me every obscenity in his limited vocabulary: This is the behavior of a liar caught in a lie.

You hear me, Folks? You’re a liar, and a disgraceful coward, to boot.

Deadline Hell in South Carolina

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley spins for Mitt Romney
after the CNN debate, Jan. 19, 2012

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Last night was one of those deadline nightmares that occasionally occurs when I’m exhausted, trying to make sense of a complex situation with a brain numbed by fatigue. I only got about four hours sleep after my 479-mile round-trip journey upstate Wednesday, and news was breaking fast Thursday, when I spent the afternoon down at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, which is strung out at multiple sites over a four-block space in downtown Charleston.

By the time I left the North Charleston Convention Center last night about 11, I’d written the first 200 words of my column, then returned to the Marriott on Meeting Street, media headquarters for the SRLC, intending to finish up quickly. But Bryan Preston of PJ Media was here and we got to talking and by the time I filed the column it was 2 a.m. By the time I got back to the hotel where I’m staying with Ali Akbar of NotMittRomney.com, it was almost 3.

So I slept until nearly 10 a.m. today and then chewed up a bunch of time trying to upload video, which was thwarted by an uncooperative hotel WiFi system and by the time I finally gave up on that, it was time for us to come back downtown for Ali to moderate a panel discussion about vote fraud. Then we went to eat at a barbecue place on King Street — my 13-year-old son pronounced it the best food he’d ever eaten in his life — and I got back to the Marriott about 4 p.m.

All of this, you see, to explain the paucity of blogging this Friday, which is the one day of the week when I don’t have a deadline for the Spectator.

Last night after the debate, I was nearly crushed in a media scrum surrounding Rick Santorum, the only one of the candidates who appeared in the “spin room” at the convention center:


Reporters were wedged into such a tight circle around the candidate — TV camera crews and photographers were packing in three-deep — that it probably would have been illegal in South Carolina before the Supreme Court ruled state sodomy laws unconstitutional. But I got the quote I needed for the lead of my American Spectator column:

The race for the Republican presidential nomination has finally come down the Final Four, and the swift reduction of the field helped make Thursday night’s debate here arguably the most entertaining of the 17 televised debates during this long campaign.
Yet the debate was in some sense anti-climactic, coming as it did on the heels of so much drama elsewhere on the South Carolina campaign trail. “The last 24 hours, I think, will go down in primary history as probably one of the most tumultuous 24 hours that we’ve seen,” former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said after the debate at the North Charleston Convention Center, televised on CNN.
Thursday’s biggest developments in the campaign preceded the debate by several hours. First, ABC News began releasing excerpts of its interview with Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife, who claimed that the former House Speaker had asked her to have an “open marriage.” Next, officials in Iowa reported that the final count from the Jan. 3 caucus showed that Santorum had beaten former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney there. Then, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called a press conference to announce that he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Gingrich.
Perry was the second candidate to drop out of the race this week, following Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s withdrawal Monday. This winnowing of the Republican field in South Carolina, strangely delayed after the usual proving grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire, produced a quartet of candidates — Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Texas Rep. Ron Paul — who mixed it up in a feisty battle that began with a volatile exchange between Gingrich and CNN moderator John King. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And now the headlines via Memeorandum:

Fake CNN email used as dirty trick in South Carolina
— CNN

Clemson Palmetto Poll finds Gingrich leading,
20% of S.C. voters still uncommitted
— Clemson University

Romney’s ‘Prevent Defense’
Yielding Big Gains to Opponents
— New York Times

It looks like Newt will win here and — even though I’m for Santorum — that’s good news. Somebody had to beat Romney here to stop his momentum. Santorum beat Romney in Iowa and if Gingrich beats Romney in South Carolina, then all three candidates will be 1-for-3, and the campaign continues.

Will Future Historians View SOPA As A Bridge Too Far?

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by Smitty

The whole notion of crushing the many in the name of the few is looking old and busted these days. Paul Hsieh offers a great roundup at PJ Media:

Steve Blank offered this analogy: “It’s as if someone shoplifts in your store, SOPA allows the government to shut down your store.”
But even though SOPA proponents in Congress appear to be backing down in the face of public pressure, the legislation is not yet dead but merely temporarily “shelved.” The Senate version, Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is still very much alive.

Rule 5 celebrates the abysmal pun.

This blog has been concerned about Pippa, and rejoices at this news.

But is saving the world from online piracy enough, alongside the efforts to stop global warming and the Keystone XL pipeline? In addition to offering a world where the internet saves the masses from piracy, the government should also be saving us from poverty, don’t you know?

The implicit assumption driving the income inequality debate is that a decent life is one where your neighbor doesn’t have too much more than you do. The problem with this formulation is that if it’s true, then government can’t create a decent life for its citizens by raising their standard of living through government handouts.
When “a decent life” is defined as one where no one is allowed to have “too much” (too much income, too much profit, too much of anything), the only way to deliver a decent life is to reduce everyone to the same level.

As the ancient commenter from Nazareth noted: “For ye have the poor always with you. . .” I’m still trying to work out how the people who are so concerned with tolerance cannot tolerate private property. Somehow, rather than actual concern for the poor, I surmise it has more to do with political power. There is much power to be garnered from triggering crises, and then riding to the rescue, as Rahm Emanuel will tell you.

So, what are we to make of Bob Beckel’s admission that creating dependency upon government was a terrible mistake? My long-term contention is that this here internet is going to lead to the realization of the Founder’s dream of limited government. Too many people are realizing that the merely 71-page legislation is a bucket of tripe; that the Information Age should be enhancing liberty, not crushing it, and that all of the income inequality/99% hooey is nothing more than Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield for #OccupyResoluteDesk’s re-election effort.