Insty links The Hill discussing snuffing the Department of Transportation.
Appearing late last week on a radio show in his home state, Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) agreed with the host of the program that the DOT was a “middleman” in transportation projects that can be done without.
“Well, I think there are some great ideas that would basically turn the Department of Transportation back to the states, because why do we have this system that says, hey, we’re going to just have you collect money, and we’re going to scrape some off the top,” Gardner said when KFKA 1310 AM host Amy Oliver asked him about the proposal Friday.
Freaking great idea! This can be a gateway drug for scaling back other federal over-reach. It is a good thing to hear serious discussion of trimming the federal bureaucracy.
Furthermore, I should like to propose a rule, that no new federal bureaucracy can outlive the POTUS who creates it. A regular lifecycle of creation and destruction would blunt the effect of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
NEWTON, Iowa
Tuesday, I met with Peter Singleton and Michelle McCormick of Iowa for Palin. And during our conversation, Peter kept referring to “when” Sarah Palin gets into the 2012 campaign. All the pundits have concluded that she’s not running, but . . . well, it’s Sarah Palin we’re talking about, so never say never:
After a more than two-month hiatus, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is planning to crash the presidential party once again with a heartland-themed re-launch of her “One Nation” bus tour this week in Iowa, according to a Palin fundraising email obtained by CNN.
Palin is bringing her Constitution-draped bus to the Iowa State Fair, just 30 miles south of where the Republican presidential field will take the stage on Thursday for a presidential debate in Ames.
It’s not yet clear which day the tour begins, but her surprise arrival in Iowa will happen before the closely watched Ames straw poll. Palin is not on the straw poll ballot.
Whether I’ll be able to catch Palin’s bus tour is an open question. She hasn’t published a schedule, although she has released a video:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at
a fundraiser for the Polk County Republican Party.
DES MOINES, Iowa
Wow — what a crowd! I just got through covering Mitt Romney’s speech to a fundraiser for the Polk County GOP, and it was kind of eye-opening to see how much more media coverage the national front-runner gets.
So far in Iowa, I’ve been to events for Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. If they get a couple of local TV stations and two or three newspaper reporters to an event, that’s “good coverage.” But at today’s Romney event — held at the home of a local businessman — it was a totally different level of coverage: The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, Gwen Ifill, Charlie Cook, Al Hunt, Carl Cameron of Fox News, etc. I counted no fewer than 12 TV or video cameras recording Romney’s speech. Here’s my brief report at The American Spectator:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney? said Wednesday that America is “in crisis” as a result of President Obama?’s policies.
“I think you have to tell people the truth, and America is in crisis,” the former Massachusetts governor told a gathering of Republicans here. “We elected as our president a person we didn’t know very well. . . . There were people who said, ‘I wonder what will happen if we choose as president a man who has no experience?’ Now we know – and it’s not a very positive thing,” .
Romney spoke at a backyard party at the home of Des Moines businessman Nick Van Patten. The event was a fund-raiser for the Polk County GOP.
“You’ve got a lot of people in this country who are hurting, who are suffering by virtue of the president’s policies,” he said. “You may ask, ‘What did he do that was so bad?’ My answer is, well, almost everything.”
While he hasn’t made a strong effort in the upcoming Iowa Republican straw poll, Romney will participate in a debate Thursday at Iowa State University in Ames.
Mitt was accompanied by his oldest son, Tagg, and Tagg’s 15-year-old daughter Allie, who was making her first-ever campaign trip with her grandfather, whom she calls “Papa.”
My wife called me and said she saw me on Fox News, walking through the background. Given how many photographers were following Romney around during the event, I’m sure some people will pick up their newspapers tomorrow, see a picture and wonder, “Who’s that dude in the hat in the background?”
I’ve got more photos and video of the media mob scene — I even bumped into Duchess Rebecca — but right now I’m on deadline for Thursday’s American Spectator column. Please hit the tip jar.
UPDATE: By the way, I’d said this morning that I planned to hit the Romney event and then run up to Ames for a 7 p.m. Tim Pawlenty rally. That didn’t happen because, although the Romney event was scheduled for 5 p.m., the candidate didn’t arrive until about 6 p.m. and by the time he spoke, it was nearly 7 p.m. So there was no way I was going to make it up to Ames in time to hear Pawlenty, and also I saw a chance to get online quick with that brief news account of Romney’s speech, so I found the nearest McDonald’s and logged onto their WiFi. Once again (as on Monday night), I’ll be filing my Spectator column from a McDonald’s.
UPDATE II: Romney just rolled out this online campaign ad:
The Progressive is the political equivalent of the stereotypical unethical used car salesmen. You need reliable transportation, he knows your need reliable transportation, and he’s all about separating you from your money with something that superficially passes for reliable transportation, but ultimately fails.
It’s one thing, in a political context, to assume a posture of libertarian indifference to people and puppets in private. Bert and Ernie just don’t matter. I really don’t care.
Yet, as a new father, there is no way under the sun that the World’s Youngest Blogger is going to suffer regular exposure to ideas that are pure dreck. Sesame Street and the Muppets were great back in the day, but something less poisonous, say, Veggie Tales, is what the WYB will be consuming.
While not explicitely setting myself up in judgement over anyone’s choices (the Almighty, History, and Economics do that far more effectively) I will repeatedly make positive choices in favor of the obviously truthful, correct, workable path. If the diseased, Progressive mindset overtakes the WYB later on, it shan’t be for lack of better counsel on my part.
Daily Pundit links Taylor at Outside the Beltway on the British riots in what is yet another willful attempt at non-analysis:
As best I can tell, the riots did not have a political motivation (the spark/excuse was the police shooting a suspect) and the general tenor appears to be wanton criminality rather than political statement. Certainly the current economic situation (and the relevant politics) is feeding the behavior, but at this point I don’t think that one can make broad political claims.
Oh horsepucky, Taylor: if these riots lack a political basis, then so did the American Revolution. The differences are (a) that these rioters are much closer to Parliament, and (b) there is no leadership core to kick the useless Parliament to the curb.
These types of events are complicated and one suspects that understanding this particular event will take some time to accomplish. I certainly am not going to claim to have answers at this point and am skeptical about those who claim to understand the event, especially if they think it fits some simplistic ideological worldview.
Taylor, obfuscation is as great a sin as oversimplification. What’s at work here is the unwillingness of the Progressive, Ruling Class Overlords to take an honest look at the situation. Honesty implies some notion of truth, some objective standard against which measurement occurs. Thanks for self-identifying as one of the spineless sophists more part of the problem than the solution, Taylor. Intellectually curious people should avoid your classes like ObamaCare.
Romney has not spent the summer attending an endless series of campaign events like many of his fellow contenders (he’s been concentrating on fundraising) and he’s taken heat for staying a little too above-the-fray on important national issues. (He didn’t take a position on the debt ceiling deal, for example, until the last-minute.)
He’s also largely avoided the highways and dusty country roads of Iowa that candidates like Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain have been crisscrossing for weeks. Romney’s last visit to Iowa was in May.
He’s spent a seven-figure sum and the bulk of his time on the campaign trail courting the Iowa grassroots. Operatives call his expansive Iowa organization the best in the state.
As the only mainstream Republican candidate actively competing in the Ames straw poll — thanks to Mitt Romney’s decision to skip the event and Rick Perry’s presidential race slow-walk—Tim Pawlenty may never have a better opportunity to break through in the 2012 campaign than this Saturday.
With so much firepower behind Pawlenty and so few candidates who have a plausible chance at coming out ahead, Hawkeye State politicos say Ames will be a potentially campaign-changing test of the Minnesotan’s strength.
But if Pawlenty fails to deliver, it will be a grim — and possibly fatal — omen for his underfunded presidential bid.
Who anointed Burns and Haberman with the authority to declare which Republicans are “mainstream” and “have a plausible chance”? Is it their place to decide that, e.g., Michele Bachmann is not a “mainstream Republican” and therefore doesn’t “have plausible chance”? There will be many thousands of Iowa Republicans at the Ames Straw Poll who will cast their ballots for candidates who evidently don’t merit the “mainstream” sobriquet which Burns and Haberman consider themselves uniquely fit to bestow.
And this “plausible chance” trick would not be nearly so insulting if we didn’t know in our hearts — and we do know it, don’t we? — that both Burns and Haberman (like practically everyone else at Politico) voted for Obama in 2008 and intend to vote for Obama again in 2012, so that we have partisan Democrats telling us which Republicans are “mainstream” and “plausible.” Meanwhile, here’s the lead of my latest column:
DES MOINES — Tim Albrecht likes to tell a joke about an Iowa Republican being asked whether he’s going to support a certain presidential candidate in the Ames Straw Poll. “I don’t know,” the Iowan replies. “I’ve only met him twice.”
The joke by Albrecht, spokesman for the state’s popular Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, refers to how accustomed Iowans are to being personally solicited for their support in this state whose first-in-the-nation caucuses have long been a crucial proving ground for presidential candidates. While most Americans go their entire lives without ever meeting a serious candidate for the nation’s highest office, campaigning here is a face-to-face business where voters expect to shake hands and talk directly with those who seek their votes.
That tradition of old-fashioned politicking is what the Ames Straw Poll is all about, which explains why some Iowa Republicans seem a bit miffed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s long-rumored entry into the 2012 presidential field. Last week I began calling him the “Phantom Menace” of Iowa because, like the sinister Sith of the “Star Wars” series, he seems omnipresent even though he is far away. Ads promoting Perry’s candidacy have been running in fairly heavy rotation on Iowa TV recently, and his shadow campaign has been soliciting write-in votes for Saturday’s straw poll. However, the governor himself hasn’t yet stumped here, while the other GOP candidates have been frenetically crisscrossing the state imploring Iowans to “join me here in Ames,” as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann says in her own TV ads. . . .
Just as a final note: I’m meeting today with Will Upton of Americans for Tax Reform, who flew into Des Moines today to attend a Wednesday morning meeting of Iowa conservative leaders. Will called me after he landed at the Des Moines Airport and reports that Mitt Romney was on his American Eagle commuter flight into town: “He was in coach with the rest of us!”
Oh — and Ladd Ehlinger Jr. is coming to town to meet with a potential client.
