The Other McCain

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

Rick Santorum in Windham, N.H.

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 11 Comments

WINDHAM, N.H.
The Southern New Hampshire 9-12 Project is hosting “An Evening With Rick Santorum.” I just interviewed State Sen. James Luther, who endorsed Santorum today. Luther said Santorum first asked for his endorsement six months ago — and kept asking and asking until he finally got it.

Among the press here for the event are Kerry Picket of the Washington Times, Robert Costa of National Review, Dan Balz of the Washington Post, and Michael Barone of The Washington Examiner.

UPDATE: Like all of Santorum’s town halls today, this event is packed.

UPDATE II: Barone said he thinks the crowd for Newt Gingrich here last month was larger, but this is still a full house.

UPDATE III: The 9-12 group leader, who is also a state representative, just boosted their “Candidate Positions Matrix,” which is very popular with Tea Party activists nationally.

Big news: Santorum has raised $2 million in the past 48 hours and the campaign is planning a major South Carolina ad buy.

UPDATE IV: Santorum gets a standing ovation when he’s introduced. Jokes that polls show him “a mere 39 points behind Governor Romney.”

UPDATE V: Santorum urges the audience to “lead, don’t follow. . . . Pick who you think is the best person.”

In Q-and-A, the first question was about detention of U.S. citizes, second question was about “Agenda 21” and U.S. sovereignty.

Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, New Hampshire, Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum in Concord, N.H.

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 31 Comments

CONCORD, N.H.
When we walked into the Grappone Conference Center here where Rick Santorum is speaking at the College Convention 2012, I bumped into Phil Klein of the Washington Examniner who was talking to Jake Tapper of ABC News. Shortly thereafter, Joe Klein of Time magazine walked up and joined the conversation. Just now, Dave Weigel of Slate sat down beside me.

There are four network satellite trucks parked outside.

In August, when Santorum spoke at a church in Manchester, the entire press corps in attendance consisted of . . .

Pete Da Tech Guy.

Just sayin’ …

UPDATE: A couple of quick photos:


Santorum took a question and said the difference between him and Obama is based on their “foundational understanding of America.”

UPDATE II: Santorum is conducting a seminar about gay marriage. Whenever you can get online video of this, it’s gonna be an instant YouTube classic.

UPDATE III: Santorum’s remarks about Obama’s proposed cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs and Pentagon are also very strong. He seems extremely confident today, and is arguing like a man who knows he’s winning.

Speaking of “winning,” Dave Weigel Tweeted this picture.

UPDATE IV: There was a discussion among reporters at my table as to whether arguing about gay marriage with college students was a smart thing for Santorum to be doing at a time when, according to conventional wisdom, he should be acting more “mainstream.” In that conversation, I was the devil’s advocate in defense of Santorum, arguing that what he did was to signal to conservatives his willing to fight for their cause, even in hostile environments. But then again, I don’t think Santorum was thinking of strategy at all: What you see is what you get, and he’s not going to change his style.

Bandwidth on the WiFi connection here is sub-normal, and I’m going to suggest to Pete that we re-locate to a McDonald’s to upload our videos, etc. There will be another event tonight in Windham.

Category: Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, New Hampshire, Rick Santorum

Greetings From the Granite State!

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 26 Comments

MANCHESTER, N.H.
My flight arrived late at Boston’s Logan Airport, and I ought to demand a refund from AirTran because their advertised in-flight WiFi service was out of order, which no one seemed to notice until the passenger in Seat 30D — that would be me — asked the flight attendant about it. Of course, none of the crew knew how to fix the problem and my expressions of anguished desperation were met with helpless shrugs of indifference.

“Customer service” is so 20th century.

Da Tech Guy was waiting curbside at Logan, his 1999 Buick Le Sabre fueled and read for the race up I-93 to New Hampshire. The question was where in New Hampshire? Pete had the Rick Santorum schedule. There was a 1 p.m. event in Tilton, but my delayed flight made that an iffy proposition. So we resolved to wait for the 3:30 p.m. event in Concord. This gave us time to stop off here at the McDonald’s near the Manchester airport where I can attempt to do some of what I would have done if the WiFi on that AirTran flight had been functional.

UPDATE: Just when you thought my idiot cousin Meghan couldn’t possibly make herself more obnoxious:

“If he had endorsed Santorum, I mean, I would be like slitting my wrists on the table right now,” Meghan McCain said about her father’s endorsement of Mitt Romney.”

This is another reason why conservatives should support Rick Santorum: Because I’m sure if he gets the nomination, Senator Santorum will ban Meghan from the convention in Tampa.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy has dubbed this McDonald’s “The Ray Kroc Memorial News Center.”

UPDATE III: I read the Des Moines Register on the plane, and they had several excellent follow-ups to the Iowa caucuses:

In Jefferson County, in Iowa’s southeast corner, Paul won a stunning 49 percent of the vote, more than doubling next-place Santorum.
He also won there in 2008, his only first-place finish in that contest.
What gives?
County seat Fairfield is home to thousands of devotees of the Transcendental Meditation spiritual movement and site of the Maharishi University of Management, which is aligned with the movement.
Followers tend to share Paul’s views opposing military intervention and the Federal Reserve, said Bob Glade, the county’s GOP co-chairman.
“They had a campaign headquarters here for the last two months, and they were pushing real, real heavy,” Glade said of the Paul campaign.

Devotees of the Maharishi’s meditation cult in . . . Iowa? Damn. I mean, damn.

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who endorsed Santorum in December, said he thought the former Pennsylvania senator has a chance as a national candidate, adding that his Iowa momentum should be a boon for fundraising.
Anyone who heard Santorum’s post-caucuses speech on Tuesday night would be impressed, Schultz said. Santorum told the story of how his grandfather had immigrated from Italy to work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines and how he had sacrificed to bring his family to America.
“That speech really resonates with Americans,” Schultz said. “I have heard him give it many times, but the way he sequenced the elements was brilliant.”

  • A story on Rick Perry’s decision to stay in the race (an updated and expanded version of this post by Josh Hafner), which mentions Joe Allbaugh and Dave Carney among the crew of idiotic “strategists” responsible for running the doomstruck farce that is the Perry campaign. Evidently, Allbaugh and Carney didn’t get enough humiliation in Iowa to suit them, and are determined to utterly destroy any future political prospects for their client, the once widely-respected governor of Texas whom they’ve turned into a national laughingstock.

UPDATE IV: Linked by That Mr. G Guy — thanks! At the airport, I picked up a copy of the Boston Globe, the front-page headline of which is, “New dynamic for GOP as scene shifts to N.H.” And on the plane, I also read the New York Times, whose front-page story includes this interesting detail:

While Mr. Romney dominated the day-after-Iowa news coverage with his victory lap here, Mr. Santorum and his staff were slowly making the 1,400-mile journey from Des Moines in a King Air propeller plane that did not deliver them here until suppertime, too late to make a star turn on the evening news. He made a nighttime turn on Fox News and CNN and landed in time for a rally that drew hundreds

Santorum raised $1 million Wednesday, the same day I published my American Spectator column, “An All-American Miracle.” And Santorum has now jumped to 21% in the Rasmussen national poll.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Well, it’s now 2:30. We’ll have to hurry to make it to Concord in time for Santorum’s event, and Pete’s Buick LeSabre isn’t as fast as that sweet black Mustang. Sigh. I miss it already.


Category: Da Tech Guy, Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, Meghan McCain, New Hampshire, Rick Santorum

Open Letter To Senators Warner & Webb

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

Gentlemen,

The news of the President appointing Richard Cordray and three NLRB names without hearings should dismay anyone who has sworn an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. The Cordray appointment opens the door to large scale mortgage re-financing. This sounds far-fetched, but we are in an election year, and look at the disinterest in legality, form, and tradition expressed by these appointments themselves.

In these appointments, as in recent adventurism in Libya, the President has revealed that the separation of powers, a crucial component of the exceptional form of government we have enjoyed in the U.S., is crumbling. Should he win re-election, one might not unreasonably expect the 22nd Amendment to join the 10th in the trash bin. And the reason for the impunity is that the Democrats control the Senate, guarding his rear, and rendering the Republicans in the house toothless to do the correct thing, which would be to impeach President Obama.

Coming to the point, then, one wonders if there are a dozen or so Senators who are Democrats and who retain sufficient conscience and honor to quit the Democrats and caucus with the Republicans. The knowledge that the Worst Majority Leader in History, Senator Reid, is running interference for him allows for the President to run amok. Gather the various independent, retiring, and American Senators, leave the Democrat caucus, and restore a semblance of separation of powers.

Maybe with the Republicans in the majority, we could also get a budget.

Thank you for your consideration,

C. Smith

Alexandria, VA

Update: linked by Fausta and Daily Pundit, for whose demise as a result of my blogging I absolve myself of culpability. It was your browser, man. You may have named the Blogosphere, but I wrote OediPOTUS Wrecks. Mwahahaha.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Virginia

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Eight Days in a Mustang Later …

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 22 Comments

“What I fear will happen is that Perry will spend several months sucking up media oxygen and burning through GOP donor cash, only to collapse early next year. This will have the effect of suffocating other conservative candidates, and thereby lead to … Romney 2012.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Aug. 9, 2011

“Stacy’s not smooth and polished and TV plastic. He’s brash and opinionated and homely as a hickory walking stick. But smooth and polished and plastic got it wrong, and hickory got it right.”
— Richard McEnroe, Three Beers Later

DES MOINES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
When I stumbled into the hotel lobby Wednesday morning in search of coffee, I noticed a guy working on a laptop and, figuring him to be another reporter in town to cover the caucuses, struck up a conversation. My opening gambit was to remark how wretchedly merciless it was for Michele Bachmann to call a 10 a.m. press conference the day after the caucuses, when most of the press corps had been up until 2 or 3 a.m. the night before.

“Why couldn’t she have let us sleep in?” I said, and groused about the fact that a 10 a.m. press conference meant that I’d be rushed to check out of the hotel afterwards.

We laughed about being victims of Bachmann’s revenge on the national media and I asked the guy who he worked for. When he said he wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I started ranting about my grudge against my hometown paper (see “Henry Grady Weeps,” Dec. 5) and alluded to my longstanding opinion that the paper’s publisher, Anthony C. Kennedy, should be eviscerated in broad daylight on Marietta Street and his entrails fed to wild dogs.

The conversation continued and it turned out that the guy was Jeremy Redmon. When I checked later, I noticed his story on the Bachmann event contained an error:

Bachmann is the second Republican to quit the race. Businessman Herman Cain of McDonough suspended his campaign last month amid sexual harassment allegations, which he vigorously denied.

Actually, Bachmann is the fourth Republican to quit the 2012 race, preceded not only by Cain, but also by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. But little details like that tend to slip through the cracks in modern journalism, where there are fewer and fewer editors to fact-check stories and most papers end up publishing whatever the hell the reporters turn in.

Quibbles about errors in articles were not what Jeremy and I were talking about in the hotel lobby Wednesday morning. Instead it was discovered that we had both once worked for the same paper. Jeremy was a reporter for the Metro section of the Washington Times for a couple of years during the decade when I was on the national desk there. Jeremy talked fondly of working with one of our Metro editors, Hank Pearson, a legendarily gruff newsman of the Old School. “He’d tell me, ‘Put some balls on that lead,'” Jeremy recalled.

Yeah, Hank was a classic. Died of cancer a few years ago.

The Old School guys are few and far between in the news business nowadays. The motley collection of staffers in the newsroom of the Washington Times back in the day — including guys like Jerry Seper, who typed his stories by the hunt-and-peck method — could never be assembled by any 21st-century editor, simply because guys like that don’t go into the news business anymore. Journalism has become an elite profession, and attracts basically three kinds of people:

  1. “Save the World” types who think of journalism as a sort of humanitarian charitable endeavor, wherein they’ll “make a difference” on behalf of the oppressed victims of society. Such people should be encouraged to join the Peace Corps instead.
  2. Neurasthenic intellectuals with literary pretensions. These people are essentially dilettantes, slumming it in the news business as a way to pay the bills until they can sell a screenplay or a novel.
  3. Would-be TV stars. The cable-news era has created a niche market for camera-friendly “personalities,” and a lot of these young kids in journalism nowadays are writing news or punditry as a means of auditioning for a TV gig. They wake up in the morning, turn on MSNBC, and imagine the days when they’ll be sitting at the table with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, who will chuckle at their pithy aphorisms and bon mots.

Good luck with that, OK?

When I got into this racket 25 years ago, there was no MSNBC, no Fox News and no Internet. A job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer at a tiny weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, was a pleasant alternative to driving a forklift in a warehouse on Fulton Industrial Boulevard as a way to pay the bills while playing with a garage-rock band.

My career plan to sell 10 million records, tour the world, marry Brooke Shields and retire by age 30 didn’t work out, and so I stayed with the journalism gig until I won some awards and came to Washington and . . .

Look, we don’t know when we begin something where it will take us. And the last thing I expected when I got into this racket was to be here in the Des Moines International Airport, two days after the Iowa caucuses, waiting for a flight to Boston to begin my coverage of the New Hampshire primary campaign.

What has made this possible, of course, is the “Army of Davids” effect: The Internet allows a writer to reach readers directly, in a personal way, without the intermediaries — publishers, editors, et cetera — who were necessary to the writer’s livelihood before the rise of New Media. And the kids nowadays who take all this for granted don’t have the hard experience of having worked in the pre-Internet era when a writer had to jump through all those hoops, and deal with all the hassles, necessary to get a chance to earn a living in the news business.

Write for the reader. If this plane I’m waiting for in Des Moines should crash on takeoff, let those be my final words of advice to aspiring journalists. Try to picture in your mind the person who is reading your words, and try to write something that person would actually want to read. The tragedy of modern American journalism is that the industry has lost sight of the reader, the paying customer who is the whole point of the enterprise.

Yesterday after the Bachmann press conference, I had to wait my turn for an interview with Bachmann’s press secretary Alice Stewart. And when I got my turn, I introduced myself as Stacy McCain of The American Spectator and The Other McCain, to which Alice replied, “Yeah. I know. You’re famous.”

It’s the kind of “fame” which, with $1.49, will get you a cup of coffee. For what it’s worth, however, Richard McEnroe is correct in observing that I didn’t get here because of my good looks. Nor did what people usually call “talent” have anything to do with it. Writing is a skill, not a talent, and this difference is important because a skill can be improved by practice. And I practiced like hell during all those years when I was covering stuff a lot less important than a presidential election campaign.

In 1987, I was working as a sports editor in Douglas County, Georgia, and the two news reporters for the paper were a couple of 20-somethings of the literary dilettante type. They did the necessary minimum of reporting while one of them worked on his novel and the other worked on his one-act plays. Meanwhile, I was burning the midnight oil trying to put out a sports section and, observing these two other guys, I vowed not to be like them. Maybe journalism wasn’t my first career choice — hello, Brooke Shields, wherever you are — but if I was going to do it, I was going to do it with all my might.

So now it’s 2012, and I’m on the campaign trail. Whatever happened to the two dilettantes, I don’t know. But I shared a cab ride from the Super 8 motel to the airport with a kid named Noah Rothman, who covered the Iowa caucuses for a site called Ology.com. I asked if he was going to New Hampshire and he said, no, the company wouldn’t pay for that trip.

We exchanged business cards and Noah said, “Oh, I know who you are. I follow you on Twitter.” Him and 10,000 other people. But it is you, my readers, who have paid for this trip, and I try to keep writing for you.

They just called boarding for my flight, and it’s time to go, onward toward the final humiliation of “Governor Asterisk.” The ultimate collapse of the Perry campaign will come later.

My intent in this post was to name-check everyone who has contributed to the Shoe Leather Fund to send me out on this crazy journey, but there’s no time for that now. They’ve just called final boarding and I can’t afford miss that flight because, after all, you paid for it. I hope you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth so far. But there are still many miles to go, and so there’s just enough time now for me to type the Five Most Important Words in the English Language: Hit the freaking tip jar!

— 30 —

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in Iowa, Fear and Loathing in New Hampshire, Iowa, New Hampshire, Shoe Leather Fund

LIVE AT FIVE – 01.05.12

Posted on | January 5, 2012 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
After Slim Iowa Win, Romney Seeks Big NH Victory

This man may have other ideas

Meanwhile, Newt sharpens his knives as Governor Asterisk smells victory

Obama To Personally Unveil New Defense Plan
Billions in cuts coming along with narrowing of focus to Asia

Explosions Rock Baghdad Neighborhoods
Or, Thursday



POLITICS
Obama Disses Senate With “Recess” Appointment Of Cordray

Acting head of CFPB, ex-Ohio AG Richard Cordray

President makes recess appointment even though Senate is technically in session

Perry Reconsiders, Stays In Race

Wisconsin Recall Effort Races Against Time

NY Governor Cuomo Sets Aggressive Agenda For 2012

Indiana House Democrats Stall Session Over Right-To-Work Bill

NC Republicans Consider Overriding More Of Perdue’s Vetoes

Bachmann’s Next Steps


Super PAC Attacks And Their Effect On Iowa

Tea Party Having Trouble Settling On One Candidate

Santorum, Gingrich Join Perry Challenge To Virginia Primary Ballot Rules



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Kodak Teeters On The Brink
Wichita Era Ends At Boeing
Brent Rises To Near $114 After EU Agrees To Boycott Iranian Crude
U.S. Auto Sales Finish 2011 Strong
U.S. Stocks End Mixed; Fed Urges Action On Housing
Gold Gains On Asian Demand
Yahoo Picks PayPal Exec As Latest CEO
Lenovo Adds New Core Chips, Thunderbolt To ThinkPads
iPhone 4S Goes To China: Siri To Start Speaking Chinese In 2012
Zynga CEO Sees Shift To Free Gaming



SPORTS
Diaw Leads Bobcats Past Knicks, 118-110

Charlotte's Corey Maggette shoots over the Knicks' Toney Douglas as Carmelo Anthony looks on

Center scores 27 with six assists in Bobcats’ victory

Mountaineers Rout Clemson 70-33 In Orange Bowl

Billups Solid In Return As Clippers Run All Over Mavericks, 117-89

Captain’s Triple Century Gives Australia Hope Of Test Win (Audio)

Cubs Swap Zambrano To Fish For Volstad

Alabama Out To Prove It’s #1 In Rematch With LSU

Torre Eyes Dodger Bid



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
“Wild Sexual Urges” And Four Other Reasons Behind The Katy Perry/Russell Brand Split

Russell & Katy

Bad craziness in the bedroom

Zooey’s Available
Worth $3 million with no credit card debt

Justin Timberlake & Jesica Biel Engaged

Paris Hilton Means Business For FHM

Universal Considering “Bridesmaids” Sequel Without Kristen Wiig

“Evil Dead” Reboot’s New Ash? Snow White

Martha Stewart Show Gets Axe


Noel Clarke Joins Paramount’s “Star Trek 2”

Leah Messer From “Teen Mom 2” Pregnant Again And Engaged

Emma Roberts Puts College On Hold



FOREIGNERS
Activists: Syrian Regime Misleading Arab League Observers
Gold Mine Landslide Kills 25 In Philippines
ROK Reaches Out To Norks After Kim Jong Il’s Death
William Hague: Burma To Free More Political Prisoners
Taliban Kill 15 Tribal Police In Pakistan
Rival Militias Clash In Libyan Capital
Bombs Hit Nigerian Towns As Boko Haram Deadline Expires



BLOGS & STUFF
George Will: Suddenly, A Fun Candidate
Rod Dreher: Kamikaze Newt?
Allahpundit: Governor Asterisk On McCain Endorsement – “Nobody Cares”
Jennifer Rubin: Credit Santorum With Sinking Ron Paul
Hit & Run: A Night At The Caucus, And A Ron Paul Victory Party That Wasn’t
Major Garrett: Gingrich Commits Political Malpractice
Rush Limbaugh: This Race Is Far From Over
Michelle Malkin: He’s Baaaaack
Weasel Zippers: I Have An “Obligation” to Act Like A Dictator
Andrew McCarthy: Reid Backs Obama On Recess Appointments
Legal Insurrection: Obama Desperately Seeking A Crisis to Take Advantage Of
Big Hollywood: Rockers Whine About GOP Candidates Playing Their Songs
Ed Driscoll: Olbermanning Your Way Out Of The Business
Blackfive: The Definition Of Insanity


SOTD: Quixote

Category: Live at Five

Iowa Victory Lap

Posted on | January 4, 2012 | 35 Comments

DES MOINES, Iowa
Today I checked out of the hotel near Santorum HQ in Johnston and drove down toward the Des Moines International Airport where I checked into a cheap motel. Then I went to Taco John’s and got four tacos, a burrito, chips and salsa. On the way back to the motel, I stopped into a convenience store and got a 40-ounce Budweiser. Dropped that off at the motel, then drove over to the airport and returned the Mustang.

God, I’m gonna miss that car.

And I’m gonna miss Iowa, too. All the pundits who badmouth the Iowa caucuses have no idea how much fun it is to take a 40-mph curve doing 80 in a Mustang, while running late for a candidate event in some small town out on the prairie. I don’t know what these pundits do for amusement, but they’ve never done anything as fun as making that run from Montezuma to Pella in a sweet black Ford Mustang convertible.

(Aside: Do they have car rental agencies in Vanuatu? And do those agencies have any Mustang convertibles on the lot? What’s the daily rate? Someone should investigate this.)

On my way to the airport, I called Richard McEnroe of Three Beers Later to thank him for the linkage. And after returning the Mustang to the rental agency, I called Jimmie Bise of the Sundries Shack because I needed a shoulder to cry on. Read more

Category: Da Tech Guy, Fear and Loathing in Iowa, Iowa, Jimmie Bise Jr., Shoe Leather Fund, Three Beers Later

At Least The Grand Wizard Isn’t Predicting BHO Gets The Cancer

Posted on | January 4, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Tough luck for BHO, whose economic magic has failed to impress Mexican Grand Warlock Antonio Vazquez:

Mexico’s Grand Warlock predicted US President Barack Obama would fail to win re-election and two more Latin American leaders would be diagnosed with cancer, in a traditional New Year’s forecast Tuesday.
The Grand Warlock, or “Brujo Mayor” in Spanish, leads a Mexican tradition of “brujeria” or sorcery centered in the southeastern city of Catemaco.

If he’s lost the Central American quack vote, I daresay BHO is toast. But when BHO can no longer deny the toast-ality of his existence, will he feign some medical excuse for not pressing on. . .?

Or maybe BHO can hire some Cuban Santería priests to denounce Vazquez. Hey, it wouldn’t be any less valid than the rest of the noise he’s spending your grandchildren’s substance upon.

 

Category: Barack Obama
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