CAIN-MANIA IN ORLANDO?
UPDATE: 7 Standing Ovations for Cain; Vultures Circle Perry’s ‘Sunshine Special’?

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Supporters greet Herman Cain’s bus in Orlando.(Photo: Katrina Trinko)

Last night I talked to Sarah Rumpf, the “Sunshine State Sarah” blogger who is a delegate to the Florida GOP gathering in Orlando that will announce the results of a crucial straw-poll vote this afternoon.

Sarah was eager to tell me about how state Rep. Scott Plakon, chosen as Florida “Legislator of the Year” by Americans for Prosperity, had decided to endorse Herman Cain after Thursday’s debate. I re-Tweeted her news, but didn’t jump right on doing a blog about it, because it didn’t seem like any kind of gigantic shocking exclusive.

Well, stupid me! Here’s Byron York’s scoop from Orlando:

There’s no scientific polling, but talks with dozens of delegates who will vote in today’s Florida straw poll suggest that many are making last-minute decisions to vote for Herman Cain.
What seems to be happening is this: A lot of delegates came to Orlando planning to vote for Rick Perry. But Perry’s poor performance at Thursday night’s Fox News-Google debate gave them pause and re-opened the question of whom they will support. And many of the conservatives who were attracted to Perry will, when asked for a second choice, naturally gravitate to Cain, who, it just happens, had a particularly good debate on Thursday. So with Perry not commanding the loyalty he did just 48 hours ago, Cain appears to be picking up support.

Wow, did I completely miss an exclusive or what? York’s account closely matches what Sarah told me last night: Perry’s supporters at the GOP event seemed demoralized Friday, while Cain’s supporters were fired up.

We don’t yet know how this will translate to straw-poll votes — the result will be announced about 5 p.m. ET today — but I’m kicking myself for not going with Sarah’s report when she first told me about it.

UPDATE: My friend Ruth Malhotra also reports from Orlando:

This is significant in that Malhotra is a longtime Romney supporter, so if she’s seeing a shift toward Cain, that’s basically objective.

UPDATE II: Katrina Trinko of National Review reports from Orlando:

Allahpundit notes an ironic point:

If [Rick Perry] done well at the debate, this straw poll wouldn’t even be worth blogging: Romney’s not actively competing (although he’ll be on the ballot) whereas Perry’s spent a bunch of money to make a splash in a crucial primary state.

And speaking at a breakfast meeting this morning, Perry actually raised the stakes: “I have all my hopes on Florida.”

Why am I reminded of Ed Muskie and the “Sunshine Special”?

UPDATE III: Press release from the Cain campaign:

For Immediate Release:
Saturday, September 24, 2011

For More Information:
Ellen Carmichael, (678) 601-2772
[email protected]

Plakon Endorses Cain
(Orlando, FL)- Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain received the endorsement of Florida state representative and noted conservative leader Scott Plakon today in a room of more than 1,000 supporters at the Rosen Center in Orlando, Fla.
Plakon, who represents Florida’s 27th district, was named the Americans for Prosperity- Florida Legislator of Year in 2011 and is known for his sponsorship of Florida’s Healthcare and Freedom Act.
Cain has been widely touted as the winner of last night’s Fox News/ Google/ RPOF debate in Orlando. He addressed CPAC Florida today and continued on his nationwide bus tour throughout the Sunshine State.

Dave Weigel: “The shadows of vultures have been all over the Perry campaign since the debate.”

There Exist Things That Make The PuffingtonHost Look Sane

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by Smitty

Insty is off doing the Founders proud, and he links some ‘Political Eclownomist’ named Raymond Lotta who has apparently smoked a. . .no, too obvious.

Under the rubric of dialogue and debate between the “Left” and Right about amending the U.S. constitution, this conference will further legitimate the reactionary Tea Party movement.

The U.S. is waging unjust imperial wars. The ecosystems of the planet are endangered. The know-how and technology exist to produce enough food for everyone on the planet; meanwhile some one billion go hungry. Capitalism is a horror and a failure.

I put this challenge to progressive people seeking change and attending this conference. Rather than reaching out to the proto-fascists and Tea Party-ers with their anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and racist-encoded “states rights” agenda, rather than looking to repair a system that has only meant misery and more misery for humanity—why not reach forward to a viable and emancipatory alternative? This is what the Constitution of the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) From the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S. is about.

Raymond, may the Almighty arrange for you to see the depth of your falsehood, and have mercy upon your slander of innocent Tea Partiers.

I could fisk this risible article at length, but it’s really more interesting from a pathological angle. How do people become this insulated from reality? Is there hope for them under the sun?

Apparently this guy has been Mugged By Mythology.

Varying Alinsky: Sexualize Everything
UPDATED: Response To Daily Pundit

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by Smitty

Alinsky decreed: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. This is being carried out against our military. In a rare moment of disagreement, I think Daily Pundit may have become confused:

There is no ban on heterosexual sex in the military, and never has been. I just want to kill this meme before it gets a grip. The notion that gays get “special privileges” their straight counterparts don’t have is simply a lie. It isn’t true, and never has been. In fact, the opposite has been the case – heterosexuals have always had the privilege of their sexual relations, while the same privileges were denied to gays.

Read any Joint Pub, OPORD, or mission statement. I’ll produce the Navy’s here, out of pure parochial bias:

The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.

At this level of abstraction, There. Is. No. Consideration. Of. Sexual. Privilege. Whatsoever.
A combat-ready Naval force has a mission, and a crew, and the behavior of the crew has to be subordinate to the mission.
What that crew does on liberty, i.e., non-mission time, is the business of the members of the crew.
Andrew Sullivan, equally to Daily Pundit, takes a bottom-up approach to the question:

And Santorum’s despicable lie in response – that repealing DADT somehow means license of gay sexual misconduct in the armed services – was intended to reduce that soldier, his life and work, to Santorum’s obsession: the intrinsic evil of gay sex. Again, this is usual. Gays are used to being reduced to sexual acts rather than being seen as full human beings, like straight people, with sexuality sure, but a whole lot of other things as well.

Now, I’m from the ‘form follows function’ school of thought on the matter. While perfectly capable of creativity in many aspects of life (I once wrote a set of VBA classes that made MS Access code pretend it was Internet Information Server) doing anything non-obvious with manhood has never been of interest to me.
And I can maintain a libertarian indifference to those who do. Judge the tree by the fruit, say I. Could you define gay sex as evil? Not my task. Could you define Santorum as obsessed with gay sex? Clearly, Sullivan has.
The point of this post is that, if we want to wreck our military, we can continue to drench the military mission in estrogen and testosterone. Taking the individual, private behavior of service members and making it the main focus of service members will be an excellent path to ruin.
This post expands on the ideas of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Don’t Care.” The military continues to be politicized, perhaps at the expense of mission effectiveness. As an aside, I’m glad to be headed out the door. I really don’t want to be on the FOB which is overrun because the chain of command is too worried about tangential, irrelevant, but politically and hormonally appealing issues at the expense of readiness.

Update: DailyPundit decries the above argument:

Overrun by what? Who? Can you cite even one instance of that occurring due to the sexual orientation of those in the FOB?

Didn’t think so.

Change is hard. But this sort of straw man flambe only makes it harder.

Well, no, I have no historical examples of a policy which is just now being implemented.

Furthermore, when I said I “really don’t want to be on the FOB which is overrun. . .” I am not wishing that such an event occur, merely to bolster my argument. As I was saying in the “Don’t Care” post, I predict this policy will not have much individual impact, because military individuals, for the most part, are not that interested in each others’ junk.

DailyPundit is overjoyed that gay servicemembers can get together over bre’fas’, have some coffee, and wax nostalgic over the previous night’s activities. Sure, especially before co-ed ships, that sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking, of a hetero flavor, was not uncommon.

However, since Tailhook, that sort of discussion has diminished to the point that you can be relieved for such risqué talk. In other words, the puritanical strain of political correctness is having a screw-me-no-screw-you discussion with the hedonistic strain of political correctness.

Coming full circle, Daily Pundit, (a) we’re likely talking past each other to a large degree here, and (b) the tension I’m alluding to in the previous paragraph is a jolly pile of crap I’m quite pleased to be leaving behind Real Soon Now.

The Joe McGinniss Method

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Big Government has a statement from Sarah Palin’s brother, Chuck Heath Jr., in which he calls Joe McGinniss’s book as “one lie after another.” What intrigued me was Heath’s description of how McGinniss “included in his book comments falsely attributed to me by one of his unnamed sources” and didn’t even ask Heath if he’d actually said what the “sources” said he had said.

This is journalistic malpractice of the worse sort.

If Person X tells you that Person Y said something derogatory about Person Z, you cannot publish this derogatory statement, attributed to Person Y, based on the hearsay assertion of Person X, especially when you name Person Y and Person Z but grant Person X the cloak of anonymity.

This is to allow an anonymous source (X) to accuse Y of defaming Z.

Under the Sullivan precedent, a public figure like Sarah Palin would have a hard time prosecuting a libel suit against McGinniss, but Chuck Heath Jr. is not a public figure. So for McGinniss to accuse Heath of badmouthing the Palins, based on hearsay from an anonymous source, is a dangerous thing, from a legal perspective. And it’s just plain despicable, from an ethical point of view.

The recklessness of McGinniss is astonishing, as is the irresponsibility of Random House in publishing such shoddy work.

UPDATE: In reference to some of the comments below, I am will state as a fact that McGinniss’s tale about Sarah Palin and Glenn Rice is a lie. While I offer no source for this statement, permit me to explain the dynamics of this particular situation, for which McGinniss and Random House are entirely responsible.

Notice that Glenn Rice has said nothing — not one word — about McGinniss’s book since its publication. Does that not strike you as curious?

Further notice that McGinniss did not merely claim that Sarah Palin had a one-night stand with Rice. He attributes to an anonymous “friend” of the Palins this quote: “Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.”

So the alleged tryst with Rice is, according to McGinniss’s source, merely the tip of a massive iceberg of “Jungle Fever” also involving Sarah and her sisters Heather Heath Bruce and Molly Heath McCann. Does it strike you as odd that no other Palin-hating liberal journalist has ever made such a claim? Or that no witness has stepped forward in the past two weeks to vouch for the truth of this widely publicized claim by McGinniss?

Remember that we’re talking about Alaska, a state with a population smaller than some medium-sized cities, where a mere 3.3 percent of the population is African-American.

According to the anonymous “friend” quoted by McGinniss, all three Heath sisters were carrying on “for a while” like Lili Von Shtupp with Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles: “It’s twue! It’s twue!”

Well . . . NTTAWWT and YMMV, but we may suppose that such behavior would have been so widely known in Wasilla that McGinniss could have found more than one “friend” to say it, and that somehow this alleged “fetish” of the Heath sisters might have been reported by some of the other journalists who’ve made the pilgrimage to Wasilla in search of anti-Palin anecdotes.

As Sherlock Holmes might observe, that dog hasn’t barked, has it?

Toby Harnden of the London Daily Telegraph calls McGinniss’s uncorroborated “fetish” tale what it really is: A dishonestly underhanded way of playing the race card against Sarah Palin.

McGinniss made this lurid accusation knowing full well that if Sarah (or her sisters) were to deny it, this would give Sarah’s enemies a chance to exclaim, “A-ha! That proves it! She’s a racist!”

Sarah and Todd have said nothing about this. But it’s kind of strange that no reporters have gotten any comment from Glenn Rice, nor have any of them attempted to verify McGinniss’s false “fetish” smear on the Heath sisters.

UPDATE II: The complete absence of standards — the “By Any Means Necessary” ethos of Palin-haters — prompts John Nolte’s remark:

If you want to know why the Hollywood blacklist against conservatives is real and why Hollywood conservatives stay in the closet, look no further than The Stephen Hanks Management Company.

Bingo. And the same implacable hatred of conservatives also pervades academia and journalism, so that whether you seek to engage in the war of ideas through entertainment, education or journalism, the conservative communicator is always surrounded by remorseless enemies.

Bruce Bawer does a delightful parody of McGinniss.

PREVIOUSLY:

OMG! Hollywood Liberal to Bristol Palin: ‘Your Mother’s a Whore. She’s the Devil.’ UPDATE: Gay Trig-Truther Loves Levi UPDATE: Heckler Says He’s ‘Ashamed’; Also: Is Bristol Really a ‘Homophobe’?

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Oh, the wonderful Civility™ of liberals! Bristol Palin went to a cowboy-themed restaurant/bar in West Hollywood, where she rode a mechanical bull while a reality-show camera crew shot video. Some guy at the bar shouted: “Did you ride Levi like that? Your mother’s a whore!” And when someone asked him, “What was that about?” the dude replied, “Her mother’s a f–king whore. She’s the devil.” It got worse from there. The action begins at about the 1:40 mark:

Bristol was criticized for asking the heckler if he was gay: “Is it because you’re homosexual?” Even though it turns out her gaydar was accurate, apparently it’s considered “homophobic” to make an issue of someone’s sexual orientation after they call your mother a f–king whore. (The etiquette of Civility™ is kinda complicated.) The very gay heckler, a 47-year old consultant named Stephen Hanks, seems to be either a Daily Dish reader or a Joe McGinniss fan or both. Hanks told TMZ: “I just don’t like that family. . . . Kinda felt good to get it off my chest. . . . I’m very passionate about politics . . . And I’m passionate that these people are very dangerous. I acted upon my feelings and I would do that anytime, anywhere. . . . She comes from a home, in my opinion, where gays are made fun of, where blacks are probably made fun of. . . . They’re trash. . . . She’s a racist homophobe in my opinion.”

When asked what he’d say to Bristol if given another chance, Hanks answered: “Your mother’s a media whore and a money-grubbing whore and a Dominionist who is evil and dangerous for this country — that’s what I’d say to her.”

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

It’s the New Motherf–ing Tone!

UPDATE: Thanks to Chris Jefferson, Brent Mohrman, and others on Twitter for pointing out that Stephen Hanks (a) appears to be a Trig Truther who (b) had a “SickOfPalin” Twitter account he’s since deleted, and is (c) like all gay liberals, a huge fan of Levi Johnston:

UPDATE II: Although Stephen Hanks deleted his “SickOfPalin” Twitter account, he left an associated photo account online, so you can see how he pushed Trig Truther smears.

UPDATE III: Congratulations to the online sleuths who have confirmed that Palin-hater Stephen Hanks is the proprietor of Stephen Hanks Management, a Hollywood agency whose clients include actor Michael Vartan:

stephen hanks [sickofpalin]
I’m sitting in the dressing room at #thelateshow with my client Michael Vartan

What you see here is the sloppy recklessness of liberals: Hanks included his name on his “SickOfPalin” Twitter account and used that account to Tweet about his professional client, so as to dragoon the client into the service of Hanks’s anti-Palin politics.

Hanks called into “TMZ Live” and said he was “ashamed,” evidently having realized how atrocious his behavior was: “Am I ashamed of myself today, after watching ? Absolutely.” But then he doubled down on Palin-hating: “The sentiment remains the same. I think that they’re dangerous people, especially Sarah Palin.”

Notice during the “TMZ Live” segment how the host assumes that Bristol’s question to Hanks — “Is it because you’re a homosexual?” –is “homophobic,” which I think is a complete misunderstanding. Notice that Bristol says next, “And that’s why you don’t like my mom.”

Let’s understand that Stephen Hanks is not the first case of Palin Derangement Syndrome that Bristol has encountered, and that many of the most virulent Palin-haters (e.g., Andrew Sullivan) are gay. They hate Sarah Palin because they have convinced themselves that Palin is, as Hanks said, a “Dominionist” — a Christian theocrat — and therefore anti-gay. My belief is that Bristol wanted to have a conversation with Hanks to try to explain that his hatred is an irrational reaction to a false stereotype of her mother. And it is a false stereotype.

Prior to Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage in 2008, she was widely viewed in Alaska as a reform-oriented leader, admired for her courage in taking on the GOP Establishment and powerful special interests. She’s got a libertarian streak a mile wide, and the attempt to depict her as a pawn of the Religious Right must be seen for what it is: A political propaganda campaign of the Democratic Party, aimed at exploiting fear.

Palin is indeed a devout Christian, but the image of her as some kind of demented theocrat apparently originated with John Stein, the incumbent whom she defeated to become mayor of Wasilla in 1996. During that campaign, Stein claimed he was the target of anti-Semitic rumors (he’s not Jewish, but is in fact a Lutheran of German ancestry), and this claim has been woven into a distorted tapestry of mythology about Palin’s Religious Right politics. Stein and his liberal friends were among the original Palin-haters, and have been the source of all kinds of false allegations about Sarah Palin, including the discredited claim that Palin tried to ban books from the library in Wasilla.

Once you understand how this kind of stuff gets started, and understand the political and personal motivations of those who exaggerate such a demonized image of Palin, the vast distance between that image and the actual Sarah Palin becomes apparent. And I suspect Bristol Palin asked Stephen Hanks if he was gay as a prelude to trying to convince him that he has been deceived by these media distortions.

Perhaps Bristol wanted to make Hanks aware that there are many gay people — Tammy Bruce among them — who admire and support Governor Palin. But we’ll never know, because Stephen Hanks is so full of fear and sick hatred that it was impossible for him to have a civil conversation with Bristol.

Liberals: Hating Their Way to the Progressive Future!

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Republican Nightmare Campaign Tour

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“Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever.”
— Professor William Jacobson

“The only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Yesterday afternoon my editor at The American Spectator called, wondering if I was in Orlando, and my answer was a long explanation of “no.” As I had explained at some length Sunday, the requisite trip to Ohio after the Tampa debate spoiled my plan to spend two uninterrupted weeks covering the campaign in Florida, and simultaneously deprived me of funding necessary to return in time for the Orlando debate.

Keeping Mrs. Other McCain happy is Job One, the Ohio trip was an inescapable duty, and so I had to cover last night’s debate from here in my basement office and skip CPAC Florida. This feels like abject professional failure, and the only way to recover my sense of dignity and purpose is to get back on the road as soon as possible. So please hit the freaking tip jar. Speaking of abject failure . . .

Perry’s Awful Night
— John Tabin, The American Spectator

Perry Delivers an Unsteady
Performance at Republican Debate
— PBS Newshour

Web verdict on Perry: Brutal
— Politico

Wow, Rick Perry really stunk it up in Orlando, didn’t he? Continue reading Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Republican Nightmare Campaign Tour →

Can We Get ‘Zo To Do An Interview With Morgan Freeman?

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by Smitty

It is really, really tiring to hear the likes of Morgan Freeman trot out hackneyed tropes about Tea Parties and raaaaacism.

“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” the actor said. “What’s, what does that, what underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.'”

I’d like to see Morgan interviewed by the ‘Zo, and asked about the Tea Parties that Freeman has attended, and why Freeman insists on repeating things that are simply untrue.

Morgan, this blog would like to take a moment to forgive you for unfounded slander. I have yet to meet any serious person claiming any genetic basis whatsoever for what is amounting to the least effective Administration ever.

If  the raaaaacist charge had merit, Morgan, why would this blog and so many others enthusiastically support Herman Cain? Are you going to say that this is pure head fake; that I merely feign support for his totally American approach to unscrewing the evils of Progressivism, but will throw Cain under the bus in favor of someone less pigmented later?

Are you saying that the admiration this blog has for Allen West is just some front, and that we really feel somehow closer to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, but just have trouble admitting it?

It’s OK, Morgan. We forgive your inability to move on from America’s raaaaacist past. Let’s not paper over the fact that it existed, and also that the election of President Barack Obama signaled the closing of that period. We understand that there will always be a bitter, clinging remnant whose identity and power were shaped in that era, and who cannot let it go. Yet the pull of that dark historical singularity. . .resist we much.

Flynt Offers $1 Million For Perry Smut. . .

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by Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

Things got a bit goofy, after Flynt waved the big bucks.
Joe McGuinness showed up at Flynt’s office to collect. “I got all kinds of weird stuff of this guy that looks like Perry mixing it up with some admittedly pathetic looking old dude in a wheelchair. It’s kind of painful to watch.” McGuninness turned the laptop screen to face the leering Flynt, while the bodyguard with no neck frowned in silence.
“What a minute, that looks like me!” screamed Flynt. The frown on the bodyguard deepened, threatening to become a circle as the corners of the mouth nearly touched.
“Whoops. I guess that CGI is really making some, you know, advances,” said McGuinness, glibly, waggling his eyebrows to cover his nervousness. “Can I at least collect on the racial epithet bounty from the ObamaCare vote with this other cooked footage I’ve got?”
“That was Breitbart, you idiot! Get out of here!” the angry Flynt pointed at the door, and the bodyguard started to come around the desk to ‘help’.