This was pending late last night, but now has been confirmed: Like Rick Perry — and Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum — Newt Gingrich failed to submit enough eligible signatures to qualify for the March 6 Virginia Republican primary. That leaves Virginia voters to choose between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Irony?
A poll released Wednesday showed Gingrich with a slight lead over Romney among Virginia Republicans in the race for president. The Quinnipiac University poll shows Gingrich at 30 percent and Romney at 25 percent among Republican voters.
Bachmann and Santorum don’t have the resources to put people on the ground in Virginia; they’re both sinking everything they have into Iowa. I don’t think anyone expected them to qualify for the Virginia ballot.
But as I explained Thursday, Santorum did have an effort afoot in Virginia to get on the ballot. I was on the grassroots conference call at which that effort was discussed and a top Santorum staffer said they were “hoping for a Christmas miracle” in Virginia.
Another “Christmas miracle” would be if my friends like Ed would actually bother to read my blog once in a while.
Also, I hope Santa brings me a pony. That could happen.
So anyway, the reason the Santorum campaign didn’t submit signatures is that they fell short of the 10,000 minimum, whereas the Perry and Gingrich campaigns cleared the 10,000 mininum but were rejected during the validation process. As the state elections board says, some petition signatures are always invalidated, so to get 10,000 minimum (including at least 400 in each of the 11 congressional districts), they recommned getting at least 15,000 signatures statewide, with at least 600 in each district.
As I also explained Thursday, it was obvious the moment the numbers were announced that Gingrich and Perry, with about 11,000-12,000 signatures each, might take a hit in the validation process. But nobody important can be bothered to read this blog. IYKWIMAITYD.
UPDATE IV: And just in case anyone was wondering: No, Virginia rules do not allow write-in votes in a primary campaign.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry failed to submit enough valid signatures to qualify for the Virginia primary ballot, state GOP officials said Friday evening.
Perry’s campaign told state election officials it had submitted 11,911 signatures, but a Republican source familiar with the situation said that the Texas governor did not submit the required 10,000.
Earlier Friday, the Republican Party of Virginia certified former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) to appear on the March ballot.
While the situation is not quite as freakish as being doused in gas and having my ear cut off for a Tarentino flick, there is a noticeable “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” feel to it all.
For all I think Ron Paul has excellent ideas on monetary policy, the handwriting is on the newsletter for his campaign. His foreign policy ideas are simply unrealistic, and disqualify him from consideration, even before the fringe ideas come into play.
I thought that the Herman Cain ejection from the race was grossly out to lunch. Yet those supporting Ron Paul need to review that and note that this is just the primary. In the hypothetical case that Ron Paul held the GOP nomination, or even show up as VP somehow, we’d have a new tidbit every hour on the hour from the nomination to the election. The Obama campaign would distort Ron Paul’s corpus to the point where BHO would be saving the country from electing Adolf Mao Stalin. Ron Paul supporters need a good night’s sleep, a cup of coffee, and some reflection.
Irrespective of anyones regard for the fellow (and I don’t personally care about any of the candidates) there is a time for idealism, and a time for pragmatism. The Constitution itself has already been substantially corrupted. There isn’t much need for idealistic defense of any virginity there, since the molestation has already occurred before most of our lives began. Thus, I really hope that the 1992 debacle of Perot does not recur. You can argue that Mitt is as big a Ruling Class knob as Bush41, and I won’t defend either gentleman, but BHO is far more diabolical than Billy Jeff. There is no idealistic argument for splitting the conservative vote, only foolish ones.
Given his high mileage, is Gingrich some kind of a compromise between the silly and RomneyCharybdis*? From the WaPo:
State party officials are spending Friday certifying the signatures. They have not examined Gingrich’s signatures yet, but expected to do so by late Friday night. His campaign said it submitted 11,050 signatures .
Gingrich is actually a Virginia resident. If he can’t figure out the Newtonian mechanics of getting on the primary ballot in his own state, can he be relied upon to Win The Future?
I can’t resist the thought that, if Sarah Palin was actually running, she could have mustered a cool 20k signatures without excessive effort.
*For a bit of late-night, overly literary snark, compounded through the use of a cutesy little footnote.
Being a huge Beatles fan myself — quick, somebody tell Charles Johnson — and feeling in a rather contrarian mood today, I’m going to hazard an extremely limited defense of Ron Paul on this newsletter controversy.
Stipulate from the outset that those newsletters contained a lot of bad, wrong, racist and paranoid stuff. Further stipulate that Ron Paul authorized some cranky ghost-writer to use such fear-mongering to raise money, thereby attracting to his core following a bunch of the kind of people who enjoy reading stuff like this:
“I’ve been told not to talk, but these stooges don’t scare me. Threats or no threats, I’ve laid bare the coming race war in our big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.) The Bohemian Grove — perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress’s Mr. New Money. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica. And the Soviet-style ‘smartcard’ the Justice Department has in mind for you.”
Considering myself something of a connoisseur of lunatic gibberish, I stand in awe of whatever unknown genius wrote that demented paragraph of paranoia-for-profit. One of these days, when some shrewd publisher hires me to edit a college textbook (The Norton Anthology of Right-Wing Extremist Literature), I’ll probably cite this as a classic example of late 20th-century direct-mail fundraising appeals.
By God, he pushed every button, didn’t he? Racism, homophobia, secret societies, currency manipulation, Jew-hating, anti-communism, Big Brother surveillance — it’s all there in 94 cleverly crafted words of undiluted 100% pure fearmongering. You have to appreciate the prophetic vision of the thing, foreshadowing in the dead-tree era the subsequent development of e-mail solicitations from MoveOn.org, Organizing for America and other such radical groups.
Tom Blumer over at Pajamas Media has a crucial outing on the federal budget:
Here are two important but little-known and underappreciated points about the Super Dupers’ failure which cannot be emphasized enough:
None of the alleged “savings” under discussion (really reductions in projected spending increases) would have kicked in until the beginning of the 2013 fiscal year almost ten months from now. According to an Associated Press report, the “automatic” cuts noted earlier (if anyone believes they’re really going to happen) won’t begin taking effect until January 2013. In other words, contrary to the expectations of most, everyone involved apparently agreed during August’s debt-ceiling debacle that fiscal 2012 would be off-limits. Now, apparently, so is the first quarter of fiscal 2013.
Even if they had met their definition of super success, the $1.2 trillion involved would have reduced projected 2013-2021 spending of $40 trillion (Page XI at link) by only 3%. Spending for fiscal 2011 was $3.6 trillion. According to the CBO, if spending runs on autopilot for the next ten years — who’s to say it won’t, given that the government has already gone without a budget since April 27, 2009? — fiscal 2021 spending will be $5.4 trillion. Given the tendency to push most savings to further-off years, a “successful” Duper deal might have trimmed that to $5.2 trillion. Big duping deal.
Study the whole thing. And keep in mind that the budget affects the economy, which is The. Central. Issue. of the 2012 election, orbited of course by foreign policy, border security, the culture wars, &c.
And Barack is going to whine that he inherited the wound. Sure, and poured in a lick of salt. But when sober citizens attempting to address the real problems are thrown out of the halls of Congress. . .
Quite an interesting read over at NRO, where Black theorizes in weighty philosophical terms about the state of the GOP scrum. There is an audio version of the article, but, as it was not read in John Houseman tones, I killed it quickly. A taste:
The Obama administration doesn’t know whether to scream for joy at the thought of facing the human grenade [Newt], or to cling to its assurance that Romney is the candidate. The character-assassination squads, though their ranks are now so deep they are the largest such work party since the scores of people who crowded into the firing squad to execute the Ceausescus, couldn’t believe their good fortune. But despite a replication of the 25-battleship sustained bombardment of Okinawa, they haven’t brought Newt down. There is a sci-fi quality to him and there always was, and it is little wonder that thoughts of Frankenstein come to mind.
A littler later,
If Mitt couldn’t set anything on fire to this point, the tinder isn’t there, and efforts, even by first-class commentators such as Holman Jenkins, to perceive Newt’s destiny as warming Mitt up for the main event don’t make it. At this point — 235 years on from the Declaration of Independence, with much of the U.S. economy, public education, health care, and justice system in shambles — history will not be mocked by a Mitt-Newt death struggle for the honor of helping to affront nature and reason by reelecting a failed administration. Hegel has come to the rescue of James Madison. Newt is not the nominee; he’s the negation of Mitt, and the nomination will be deferred to the timely decision of the none-of-the-above majority.
Either Newt, too weighed down by darts, buckshot, and self-detonated combustion, will start to fade before the caucuses and primaries are too advanced, and one more declared non-Mitt, possibly Jon Huntsman, will arise; or the absence of a contender with a commanding lead will prevail until it is so close to the convention, or even at the convention, that there will be a draft of one of the non-runners, probably Jeb Bush.
What black is missing here is that if the conservative hoi polloi are so daft as to allow the Ruling Class to insert Huntsman, then the sleight-of-hand necessary to anoint Mitt would be trivial.
But Jeb Bush? Really? Other than saving Gaia by permitting the recycling of all the Democrat “No More Bush” signs, I can’t see much advantage to nominating Jeb. Which is not to say he’s less than a talented executive. Rather, if we’re so hard up in a population of 330 million for leadership that Jeb is it, we’re totally lost and might as well cling to Barack.
Some may see a brokered convention as a bad thing. It’s only bad if people continue bickering and arguing over ‘oo stabbed ‘oo. Remember, it’s politics. Keep the grieving short. Once there is a nominee, if everyone forms up behind that nominee, there is ample room for confidence. If conservatives play Barack’s game, and the fanatic followers of a certain candidate support a third-party run, there is much risk. So, as more candidates get the Herman Cain treatment, remember: there is a time to argue the fine tactical points of just how grossly unfair a lynching it was (or not), and there are times to write down some notes, set them aside, and focus on the larger picture of what must be done to restore the country, even if it’s not with your preferred candidate. Tough toenails.
“Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”
— Genesis 50:20 (KJV)
It’s strange sometimes how you find stuff to blog about. Some people are systematic — Smitty’s always sending me stuff he finds with a newfangled doohickey called a “feedreader” — but I’m kind of random myself.
Last night a reader e-mailed to say that Allahpundit had “stolen” the Virginia ballot-access story from me. You can compare Allah’s 8 p.m. post to the post I put up at 5:33 p.m. (extended with multiple updates), and see whether you think I might have merited at least a hat-tip. However, as I pointed out in replying to my e-mailer:
A. You can’t copyright an idea; and
B. Nobody owns the facts.
There have been occasions when some bloggers have made outrageous accusations that their material was “stolen” by other bloggers. Such accusations are always tiresome and usually mistaken. And in this particular case, it wasn’t as if I was down in Richmond doing original reporting from the Virginia elections office.
No harm, no foul.
Then I got looking at some of the comments on the Hot Air thread about the Virginia ballot story, and the internecine hostility was off the hook. People calling each other trolls and stuff, threatening to get people banned, etc. And toward the end, as the comment flamewar was petering out, somebody wondered why certain commenters had stopped flaming, and another commenter said he thought everybody had run off to the Quote-of-the-Day post. So I decided to check that out, and found this item about an analysis of Ron Paul’s personal investment portfolio, made public as part of his required FEC disclosure:
“At our request, William Bernstein, an investment manager at Efficient Portfolio Advisors in Eastford, Conn., reviewed Rep. Paul’s portfolio as set out in the annual disclosure statement. Mr. Bernstein says he has never seen such an extreme bet on economic catastrophe. ‘This portfolio is a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds,’ he says.”
Which is a damned fine quote, I think everyone will agree.
But I never would have known about that, if it hadn’t been for the e-mail about Allah “stealing” the Virginia ballot story. This goes to show, I think, the lesson that Joseph derived from his experiences: His brothers hated him for being the favorite, and were willing to leave him to die, but one brother was merciful enough to suggest that instead they sell Joseph into slavery.
Perhaps you know the rest of the story: By God’s grace, Joseph rose to become a mighty minister in the kingdom of Egypt. And when the famine came, Joseph’s brothers were sent to seek food in the Pharoah’s kingdom. They did not recognize the minister as their lost brother Joseph, but he recognized them, and contrived to bring the whole family to Egypt.
When at last Joseph revealed to his brothers the truth — that he, the powerful vizier on whose goodwill they depended, was in fact the brother they had spitefully sold into slavery — his brothers were terrified at the prospect of his vengeance. But he sent them to fetch their father, and when the family was reunited, Joseph told his brothers, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”
Being a miserable excuse for a Christian, I rarely resort to preaching. Yet we are saved by God’s grace and not by our own merit, and nothing is so awesome to contemplate as the sovereignty of God, who has power to save whom He will, even the most wretched of sinners. And to those whom God favors He bestows blessings, preserving against all peril.
Now think about Joseph, who suffered the shame of bondage and yet remained faithful to God. Joseph rose to a position of authority and, through the blessing of prophetic dreams, was able to provide lifesaving food to his brothers when the famine came. His brothers deserved no favor from Joseph, yet he saw that the evil they had done him was somehow part of God’s will, a blessing and not a curse.
How ironic (but not, I think, accidental) that the “Quote of the Day” was about Ron Paul’s “doomsday portfolio” — much like Joseph storing up grain for the prophesied seven-year famine.
Whether or not the Apocalypse is around the corner (“the ancient Mayans could not be reached for comment“), we know that most of us will at some point in our lives experience hard times and trouble. And we do not know in advance who will be there to help us when we need help. But like the traveler waylaid on the road to Jericho, we find that whoever helps us in our time of trouble is truly our friend, our neighbor, our brother.
So the person we may think of as our enemy — the despised Samaritan, or the brother we sold into slavery — could some day prove to be that “angel unaware” whom God has sent for our deliverance. Or it may be that we unexpectedly find ourselves in a position to act the part of the Samaritan in the parable, showing mercy to those who hate us.
As I say, I am a miserable excuse for a Christian, full of stiff-necked pride and prone to wrathful anger. Nevertheless, God is merciful toward me and so when I saw all those commenters slicing each other up at Hot Air, quarreling over nothing in the comments on that “stolen” post — well, wasn’t that exactly the lesson I needed to see?
Evidence of God’s love and mercy is everywhere around, if only we’ll take the time to look for it. For if God is sovereign, even an atheist is somehow part of the Divine Plan, and we dare not presume to know what purpose God has in mind for Allahpundit, when surely even Allahpundit doesn’t know.
Was my post “stolen”? I can’t make any such accusation, as the facts of the story aren’t my personal property, and certainly I don’t always bother to determine which blogger was “first” with a story before blogging about it myself. If bloggers hate me for every time I failed to give them a link or hat-tip they deserve, there would be a lot of bloggers hating me, too.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, you see. If we spend our lives looking around for reasons to hate people, we’ll find plenty of reasons, and next thing you know we’ll be like those crazy-ass commenters flaming each other in one of those Hot Air posts with 400 comments, where it gets to the point that the angry arguments in the comments have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the post.
King of the Comment Trolls is not my idea of a worthy career ambitiion.
Blogging as therapy is an interesting concept, and I suppose some of my venting serves a therapeutic purpose, but you can’t make a career in the New Media racket simply by unloading your emotional baggage onto a blog. Or at least, that’s a limited readership niche, and Amanda Marcotte’s already got it covered pretty good.
Life is too short to be angry all the time, constantly on the lookout for new names to add to your enemies list. It’s only two days until Christmas, and the day after that I fly out to Iowa. Why should I waste time being angry because my blog didn’t get linked somewhere? With so many blessings to be grateful for — including tip-jar hitters — why sit around making myself miserable?
Merry Christmas, everyone — and may God bless you, Allahpundit!
