The Other McCain

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

The USS George Washington: When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 14 Comments

Jimmie Bise is right: “Nothing Sends a Message Like an Aircraft Carrier,” and President Obama seems to have realized that godless commie dictators aren’t going to be persuaded by mere words:

The Pentagon has dispatched the aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea for naval exercises with South Korea following the exchange of artillery fire between the North and South.
The exercises are likely to anger China which in the past pressed Washington not to send its aircraft carriers to the sea.
The U.S. military command in Seoul announced that the carrier will take part in exercises in “waters west of the Korean peninsula” from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1.
“This exercise is defensive in nature,” the statement said. “While planned well before yesterday’s unprovoked artillery attack, it demonstrates the strength of the [South Korea]-U.S. alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence.”

As for offending the Chinese:

  1. If they can’t keep the Norks in line, whose problem is that?
  2. Our commercial ties with China are so extensive that war would be absurd.
  3. On the other hand, when will we be stronger? When will China be weaker? If Beijing wants to rumble, I say, bring it on.

But of course, China doesn’t want war with the U.S. They’ll make a lot of diplomatic noise about this situation, but the Pyongyang regime has become an embarrassment to them.

UPDATE: King Shamus isn’t optimistic:

Chances are, no matter what strategy Obama employs, he and his State Department will help to escalate the situation to something near catastrophic levels.

OMG. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s bad enough dealing with the North Koreans. The State Department is where you’ll find the real hard-line commies.

Category: Barack Obama, China, North Korea

Nine Key States for 2012

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 13 Comments

Jennifer Rubin identifies the Democratic senators who are most vulnerable in the next cycle:

Jon Tester, Bill Nelson, Jim Webb, Claire McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Sherrod Brown, and Kent Conrad, for starters. That’s a total of seven Democrats who voted for (were all the 60th vote for) ObamaCare, supported the stimulus plan, and come from states (Montana, Florida, Virginia, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and North Dakota) that are quite likely to vote for a Republican for president. And the way things are going, you might add Bob Casey (Pennsylvania) and Herb Kohl (Wisconsin), who may have gone too far left in their states.

OK, so who are the possible contenders for the GOP Senate nominations in these states? What grassroots conservatives should be doing is encouraging as many candidates as possible to enter 2012 Republican primaries. If we let John Cornyn and the NRSC handpick their pets, we’ll get a lot of Charlie Crist/Mike Castle types.

Having strong GOP Senate candidates running in these states will have an “up-ticket” benefit, especially in the key presidential swing states like Florida, Ohio and Missouri.

So, if you’re familiar with any of these states, feel free to suggest good conservative candidates.

UPDATE: In the comments, someone suggests Ken Blackwell to take on Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

Category: Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin

Sarah Palin Schools Gawker

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 4 Comments

Ruby Slipppers has the details:

Days after Sarah Palin and her publisher Harper Collins scored a major win  over the mean team at Gawker, we learn a settlement has been reached.   Alas, there won’t be a TSA screening  for Gawker at the hands of Sarah Palin any time soon.  While some may be disappointed the attorneys at Harper Collins won’t get to rifle through the junk in Gawker’s trunk, this is still a major victory for team Palin.

Read the whole thing.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Sarah Palin

Your Daily Charlie Sheen Update

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

Sorry, “obligatory” wouldn’t fit in the headline. When last we left Charlie, he was suing his porn-star date in a filing that called her an “opportunistic scam artist.” Oh, but that wasn’t what Charlie was saying in the text messages he sent her the day after their rendezvous:

In one text, Charlie says, “All I need is an Acct number etc and I will wire u 20k if u think that will cover everything … I really feel bad, u are as cool and sexy and as sweet and fun and friendly as they get!”

It seems there was a disagreement about how much her silence was worth. Charlie was willing to pay $20,000 to this “cool and sexy . . . sweet and fun” 22-year-old porn star. But when she tried to negotiate a higher fee, he (and his lawyers) decided that was “extortion.”

In non-Charlie Sheen news: TSA agents prefer to frisk passengers with nice breasts, and a Democrat shows a similarly frisky interest.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Celebrities, Scandal

‘Unexpectedly’!

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 4 Comments

“New U.S. single-family home sales fell unexpectedly in October and prices dropped to a seven-year low, a government report showed on Wednesday, pointing sustained weakness in the housing market following the end of a home-buyer tax credit.”
— Reuters

“Orders to U.S. factories for long-lasting manufactured goods plunged in October by the largest amount in 21 months, reflecting widespread weakness in a number of areas.
Orders for durable goods dropped 3.3 percent last month, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday. . . .
“The unexpectedly sharp declines raised questions about the strength of manufacturing, which has been one of the economy’s standout performers.”
— Associated Press

Category: Economics

Can You Say ‘Mandate’?

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 4 Comments

Sam Foster at American Thinker does the math on the 242-seat GOP House majority and his colleague Bill Zwerger adds about the NY-25 race:

The vindication for the NY Tea Party comes from the fact that Mr. Maffei was a true-blue, Obama supporting, Pelosi controlled liberal, who showed a great deal of disdain to any constituents who disagreed with his statist view of government’s role. In fact, he voted with Pelosi 96.5% of the time during his brief stint in the House, including yes votes on the stimulus, health-care, and cap and trade.

Why didn’t Maffei understand that this was an extreme agenda that wouldn’t sit well with voters? True, western New York isn’t Alabama, but it isn’t the Upper East Side, either. I still remember the place where Da Tech Guy and I stopped to get gas and coffee before the election:

“I work 75 hours a week at this place,” said the owner-operator of a convenience store on State Route 41 in Cortland County. “All I ever get are bills coming in, where they’re raising the taxes on this and raising the taxes on that.”
The silver-haired small business owner’s diatribe had begun when I put a copy of the Syracuse Post-Standard on the counter and he asked, “Reading about all our political prostitutes?”
Obviously I was from out of town and he had apparently spotted me as a reporter, so I asked him what his feelings were about the upcoming election. “I’m not voting for any incumbents — all the challengers, that’s who I’m voting for,” he said.

People kept saying, as loudly as they could: “We’re fed up!” And yet politicians like Dan Maffei kept ignoring them. Then Election Day arrived and the people spoke with overwhelming clarity.

But even now, Democrats are trying to pretend that ObamaCare is so popular that Republicans wouldn’t dare touch it. That’s what the polls tell them — just like the polls told them Dan Maffei was going to win by 12 points. Da Tech Guy is exasperated:

We just had an election where Republicans running against Obamacare won more seats than anyone has seen in over 50 years and you are trying to tell me there is no mandate because of your poll?

Indeed, and if you want to find the GOP mandate, a good place to start looking is NY-25, as I explain in my latest American Spectator column:

Ann Marie Buerkle was outspent by a 5-to-1 margin in her campaign against incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei in New York’s 25th district. Maffei was a phenomenal fundraiser — of his $2.7 million total, the freshman Democrat collected more than $1.2 million from PACs — and the district had voted for Democrats in the past three presidential elections, delivering 56 percent for Barack Obama just two years ago.
When Buerkle first declared her intent to run for the seat, she said, “People looked at me like I was crazy. They said, ‘He’s got so much money. How are you going to beat him?'” . . .

Please read the whole thing.

Category: Ann Marie Buerkle, Democrats, Election, Health Care, New York, Polls

Democrats in Disarray

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

One of the best things about stomping Democrats is to watch their predictably laughable reactions when they lose.

Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny has devoted enormous effort to compiling a sort of conspiracy theory: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is CORRUPT! Because they’re hiring CONSULTANTS!

And for all we know, he’s right. But let’s see how he frames his thesis:

How were all those insane Republicans able to win?
Some of them– too many of them– really are dangerous crackpots. Was it really just because Obama didn’t deliver enough of the Hope and Change agenda? Or was it because some of the very Democrats tasked with victory were focused on something entirely different from winning — focused instead on personal enrichment? This is a story of, at best, horrifying dysfunction at the DCCC.

If you’ll click that “dangerous crackpots” link, you’ll see that the list includes, among others, Renee Ellmers and Allen West, whose campaigns we’ve written about at some length. Howie Klein can’t bring himself to believe that there are voters who share the “extreme” views of these Republicans. And he also can’t bring himself to accept the Occam’s Razor explanation of the election — i.e., voter backlash against Democrats, generated mainly by the perception that Obamanomics wasn’t working.

No, simple answers won’t do. There must be something sinister afoot, for how else to explain such actions as this?

Stalwart Democrats who supported the agenda . . . were cut off by the DCCC, including progressives Alan Grayson, Mary Jo Kilroy and Carol Shea-Porter.

Alan Grayson? You want to make Alan Grayson your test case? And then you want to talk about Republicans as “dangerous crackpots”? Pot, kettle, black.

The Man on the Grassy Knoll in Klein’s conspiracy theory of Democratic defeat is former DCCC executive director John Lapp, who is now a consultant with his own firm, Raltson-Lapp Media. Lapp evidently exercised supervisory authority over the DCCC’s independent expenditure operation, as Klein explains:

Incumbents told me they would go to DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen or Debbie Wasserman Schultz and ask for financial help for their campaigns, only to be told that it was up to Lapp. One Member even told me that Van Hollen promised him help on four separate occasions, help that was never authorized by Lapp . . . and never came.

OK, looking at this accusation from the Republican side, I can tell you that there were lots and lots of GOP candidates — Renee Ellmers among them — who felt that they didn’t get enough help from the NRCC. But these were challengers, many of them running underfunded grassroots campaigns where an extra $5,000 or $10,000 would have been manna from heaven.

The disgruntled Democrats on whose behalf Howie Klein pleads were incumbent members of Congress. I’m sorry: If you’re a member of Congress and you don’t raise enough money to secure your own re-election, you’ve got worse problems than some consultant to your party’s campaign committee.

And, in point of fact, Alan Grayson’s problem wasn’t a shortage of campaign cash. He raised more than $5 million, whereas his GOP challenger Daniel Webster raised a mere $1.3 million. In what moral universe is Grayson a victim, deserving of charitable assistance from the DCCC?

Keep in mind that I have warned of “Death by Consultantitis” among Republicans, and have not stinted in criticizing the operations of the National Republican Congression Committee:

Pete Sessions should have been stripped of his [NRCC] chairmanship the day after Dede Scozzafava endorsed Bill Owens. If there were still any old-fashioned justice in the world, Pete Sessions would have been horsewhipped and stomped to death by the House Republican Caucus, his head carried through the streets atop a pike, and his mutilated headless corpse fed to dogs.

So I share, in a general way, Klein’s contempt for these Beltway bandits who claim to possess a monopoly on political expertise. And I’ve warned grassroots activists that the difference between them and the campaign professionals is that the professionals get paid — and they get paid whether their candidate wins or loses. The important thing for grassroots activists is to avoid getting bamboozled by incompetents and quick-buck artists.

Success in politics tends to breed cynicism. People win elections and obtain power. As soon as they get power, some of them start looking for the window where they can cash in their chips and exchange power for wealth. Trying to turn politics into a get-rich-quick-scheme landed Jack Abramoff in prison, but there are plenty of people — on both sides of the aisle — who’ve run scams  as cynical as Indian Jack’s and gotten away with it.

Were John Lapp and other Democrat consultants focused on their “personal enrichment,” as Howie Klein says? You betcha.

Let Howie Klein wrap his head around this: The people who run the Democratic Party are capitalists. They’re in the politics industry, and their goal in life is to get rich, rich, rich!

If you expect successful politics to be run entirely by amateurs — True Believers whose only motivation is their zealous devotion to the Sacred Cause — you’re a damned fool.

But then again, you are a Democrat, aren’t you?

Category: Democrats, Election

If You Ever Feel Discouraged . . .

Posted on | November 24, 2010 | 10 Comments

. . . think about Ann Marie Buerkle’s victory in NY-25. She is now six weeks away from being a member of Congress, but what about six weeks ago?

It was Sunday, Oct. 17, and Pete Da Tech Guy and I were driving on our way to cover the Buerkle campaign, when I got a call from the Lonely Conservative. The headline in that morning’s Syracuse Post-Standard was devastating:

Dan Maffei leads Anne Marie Buerkle
by 12 points in new poll

The poll showed Maffei with a 51-39 lead. If this poll was accurate, Buerkle was doomed. When we stopped for lunch at a McDonald’s in Hancock, N.Y., I put up a quick blog post scoffing at the poll, but honestly? I was heartsick.

You can’t put too much stock in polls. “Polls Are Not Campaigns,” as I’ve said, but I feared that this poll, which was a big front-page headline in the Syracuse paper, would have such a demoralizing effect on Buerkle’s supporters that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Buerkle campaign had been kind of a late addition to my campaign radar — I didn’t blog about her until Oct. 12 — and at that time, I had no idea what an onslaught of attack ads she was facing. Maffei had a 5-to-1 money advantage, and he was piling on more than $200,000 a week in TV ads accusing Buerkle of everything you could imagine.

Pete and I attended a Buerkle event in Clyde, N.Y., and there were maybe 50 people there. Maybe. Here it was, two weeks before the election, and the Republican candidate was still speaking to small groups, while Maffei had 1,000 at his rally with Bill Clinton.

This was not encouraging.

The next day, we covered a press conference near Syracuse where Buerkle pushed back against a Maffei attack ad that accused her of failing to pay her taxes. Maybe there were 50 supporters there. Maybe. And just the fact that she was having to do a press conference to answer an attack ad . . .

Look: You answer a TV ad with a TV ad. That’s just Campaign 101. Buerkle was doing a press conference, counting on the media to convey her response to this ad, which indicated that she couldn’t afford to run TV ads answering Maffei’s attacks.

This was not encouraging.

So when Pete and I left NY-25, I was seriously worried about Buerkle’s prospects. She was fighting hard, but unless something happened to change the dynamic of the race, it didn’t look like she could pull it off.

Anyway, Election Night found me in Boca Raton, Fla., amid the happy chaos of Allen West’s victory party in FL-22. It was difficult to keep track of results elsewhere, but somewhere during that madness I saw (perhaps at the Lonely Conservative) that Maffei was ahead by 3,000 votes.

Oh, well, nice try. Close, but no cigar. You win some, you lose some.

And then, the next afternoon, Left Coast Rebel posted the news that, due to late returns from Wayne County, Buerkle was now leading by more than 600 votes!

MIRACLE COMEBACK!

What happened? How had this campaign — outspent 5-to-1 by the incumbent and trailing in the polls — managed to pull off such an upset?

Remember the old saying, “Where there’s life, there’s hope”?

About five days before the election — while I was on my way to VA-9 to cover Morgan Griffith — the Maffei campaign played the “extremist” card with this ad:

OK, game over, right? She’s a kooky “anti-choice” extremist wingnut. Somebody like that can’t possibly get elected in this supposedly moderate district, right? But the Lonely Conservative didn’t see it that way:

NY25 covers all of Onondaga and Wayne Counties, and part of Cayuga and Monroe Counties. But a large portion of NY25?s voters are in Onondaga County. I did some digging and found out that there were 147,332 Catholics in Onondaga County alone in 2000. . . . I’m sure enough of those Catholics are registered voters who could swing the election in Buerkle’s favor. This race hasn’t been about social issues. It’s been about the economy, the direction of our country, and the failed policies of the current administration and Congress. By running this ad Dan Maffei just gave undecided pro-life voters a reason to vote for Ann Marie Buerkle.

See? Buerkle needed a miracle to win and, by highlighting her pro-life record in the final days of the campaign, her opponent gave her that miracle. Out of more than 200,000 votes cast in NY-25, Buerkle won by 657 votes, and how many of those votes were decided on the pro-life issue?

Da Tech Guy says “nobody outside of me, Stacy and the Lonely Conservative thought [Buerkle] was a winner,” but I had given her up for lost on Election Night.

You see that she and her supporters had every reason to become discouraged and quit. But they kept hoping and fighting and, thanks to an unexpected miracle, they won.

So hang in there. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

Category: Abortion, Ann Marie Buerkle, Congress, Da Tech Guy, Election, Left Coast Rebel, New York, The Lonely Conservative
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