Fear and Loathing on Highway 193; Pawlenty Aiming at Bachmann?

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DES MOINES, Iowa
Got back from Oskaloosa — an hour away on Highway 193 — about 6 p.m. local time and spent hours struggling to upload video and photos. Now I’m just a couple hours aways from my deadline for The American Spectator, and so there’s only enough time for a couple of pictures and a quick note.

Basically, the Ames Straw Poll on Aug. 13 is shaping up to be Tim Pawlenty’s make-or-break moment. And if he is broken, many observers will declare that it is his fellow Minnesotan, Michele Bachmann, who has broken him. Pawlenty and Bachmann are the only two candidates I’ve seen running TV ads here in Des Moines, and when I posted Bachmann’s latest ad here earlier today, it apparently got the attention of some T-Paw supporters.

Let’s just say that there is no love lost between the two rival Minnesota camps, OK? And we can also point out the obvious: If a Bachmann win on Aug. 13 would be a death knell for Team T-Paw, the clock is ticking down on the time at which “Minnesota nice” goes by the wayside and Pawlenty goes negative on Bachmann. Not that the candidate would attack Bachmann personally, you understand. But the oppo-research files on Bachmann wouldn’t be of any value to the Pawlenty campaign after Aug. 13, if a defeat at Ames effectively destroys Pawlenty’s viability.

Keep that stuff in mind, because surely I’m not the only journalist in Iowa who’s getting “friendly tips” about the Bachmann family’s tax records, etc. And I’m not even trying to get that kind of stuff. It’s just out there, as they say, and I can’t help it when stuff shows up in my e-mail inbox.

Now, a couple of photos from today’s events:

Herman Cain holds an impromptu press conference on the town square in Oskaloosa. Note the two handheld digital recorders at the bottom.

Dale Peterson showed up in Des Moines today. He is agricultural adviser to Cain’s campaign. Maybe he’ll also be on the lookout for people trying to steal yard signs.

And here is a video of a nice lady in Oskaloosa talking about the big annual festival:

I’ll have more later. But first I have to hit that deadline.

UPDATE: After hitting my deadline, I went out to Urbandale — about eight miles from my motel here in Des Moines — to take a quick after-hours look-see at Bachmann’s Iowa campaign headquarters, just to scope out the location. It’s in a shopping center near a pub called Groucho’s. So I was heading back out when I looked across the driveway and, less than 100 yards away from Bachmann HQ is the headquarters of . . . Herman Cain’s campaign. You could quite literally throw a rock from one office to the other. Kinda weird.

How About Some Love, VodkaPundit?

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by Smitty

Stephen Green comes close to throwing Virginia under the bus:

Virginia is traditionally GOP-friendly, but has been trending purple. Also, there’s been a huge influx of money and power and more money into the Northern VA ‘burbs around DC. That helps the state’s economy (at the expense of the rest of the nation), and makes Virginia a tough state for the GOP to pick off of Obama’s 2008 column.

You’re just trying to irritate me into even further efforts in support of American recovery, aren’t you, VP? Your double-secret head fake is likely to succeed!

Maybe I’ve lived in Northern Virginia for too long, but that concentration of history, of the very places where so many Founding Fathers lived, has me particularly incensed to see the place over-run by these slack-jawed homo bureaucratus tools. It’s flipping disgusting, starting with “Gentleman” Jim Moran at the top and proceeding down through the whole lot of the rot.

Balanced Budget Amendment Is A Pyle Of S. . .urprise

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by Smitty

Insty points to a devastating Bloomberg piece:

So the balanced-budget amendment, whatever its political popularity, possesses the following difficulties: It is poorly written and easy to circumvent; it invites judicial control of the appropriations process; and it pretends to know more than we can confidently say we do about how the economy works.

Why do we have to tell the government to manage money responsibly? Prudence in the management of the public fisc should go without saying. The fact that we have to try to be explicit about prudence is a failure. The fact that some, even the GOP leadership, think an explicit failure can succeed is downright worrisome. The fact that elected officials don’t seem to notice the downright worrisome aspect is utterly terrifying.

The problem is not an output problem. The government knows how to spend, yet the spending is where the political theater keeps the action focused. No, the problem is on the input side. If the economy is a receiver, then the government is a loudspeaker with insufficient input impedance. Maybe the loudspeaker is shorted, sitting in a puddle. If we don’t constrain the federal government’s ability to draw current, it will continue to draw current, until the receiver, currently hot to the touch, lets all the smoke out.

Thus, we can pass an Amendment a year from now until that receiver is a Class C fire, the economy is reduced to barter, and BHO is gibbering “Bushbushbushbush. . .” in the I-love-me jacket, and it won’t mean a thing.

Private Pyle is relatively serious, compared to the political theater passing itself for leadership in DC.

Why I’m A Gay Spiderman Fan

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by Smitty

Once again, I’m not tracking the uproar over the recent Progress made in comic book characters. While the World’s Youngest Blogger isn’t yet into comics, I remember fondly collecting comics for several years.

That I may not agree with the direction some comics I used to enjoy are taking seems more an opportunity than a problem, to me. Guys like Muir at Day By Day can be relied upon to produce work that is more in keeping with the American tradition.

It’s a fantastic thing that Marvel Comics is following their muse and producing the comics they feel have a market. Just that, in the privacy of my own home, we’ll be addressing the secular culture with, let us say, clarity.

This is what I mean about laughing, rather than shooting the messenger. Leave the caustic tone to the Left.

How to Prevent Economic Growth

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“Tax cuts do not . . . create jobs . . . When we do not ask the super rich and the corporations who make billions of dollars of profits off of the American economy [for more taxes], we will not have the funds to keep that engine running . . . to make sure that we can meet our nation’s obligations to our seniors, our children and our poor.”
— Rep. Barbara Lee, California Democrat

This morning I did two things I seldom do anymore — eat breakfast and read a newspaper. The complimentary breakfast here at the motel in Des Moines was excellent, and they provided the Wall Street Journal, which included a column by David Wessel that quoted Barbara Lee’s words.

Should it really be necessary to explain what’s wrong with Lee’s rhetoric? She depicts the “super rich” as villains. And they are evil because they prevent “we” — by which she means, government — from getting “the funds to keep that engine running,” as if tax revenues were the fuel of economic growth.

The entire purpose of economic activity, so far as Lee is concerned, is to meet “obligations” to old folks, kids and poor people.

(Questions: How is it that, merely by siring offspring, I have created “obligations” for my fellow citizens? Aren’t we parents responsible for the care and maintenance of our own children? How did it happen that, in the mind of Barbara Lee, this responsibility was transferred to that amorphous “we” by which she means the federal government? Why should people in Iowa or Texas be taxed for the support of children in California or Florida? Shouldn’t taxpayers at least get visitation rights to the children they’re supporting?)

Missing altogether from Lee’s discourse is any sense of the “super rich” as investors and entrepreneurs, whose capital — whether provided by the purchase of stocks or through loans — is the sine qua non of economic growth. Whatever our “obligations” may be, we cannot improve our economy by siphoning wealth from the investor class and transferring it, via government welfare programs, to people not engaged in productive economic activity.

The fact that recipients of government aid are old or young or poor (the sole qualifications for worthiness, in Lee’s estimation) obscures the fact that such aid, if funded by punitive taxes on “the super rich,” amounts to nothing less than the coercive transfer of money from the productive to the non-productive.

Even a nation as rich as ours can only do so much of that stuff before it begins to suffer from the diminution of competitive capacity.

Again, Zappa

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by Smitty

Via Hot Air, there is the Debbie Wasserman-Shultz at Real Clear Politics, desperately hoping to perform a modern miracle on the economy through repetition.

“Well, we’re going to focus on what we know is the number one priorities on Americans ease minds right now, that is creating jobs and continuing to get this economy turned around.

Once again, one is compelled to reach for the Zappa. Listening to this NSFW clip (couple of f-bombs and a sphincter reference) one is struck by the sharply prophetic portrait Zappa paints of Wasserman-Shultz. Did her image appear on his windshield while driving at night, or was that just a juicy insect?

More of the great DWS at American Glob.