The Other McCain

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

Grinder Reminder

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Via IsraellyCool, we have this gem:

While most people know about the ‘farmer tan’ on the arm, many don’t know that the parade field at a Navy boot camp is called a ‘grinder’. You get shaved bald, and walk around in the sun a few hours, and the result, for those of European extraction, is a ‘grinder reminder’.
Go, Navy!

Category: Uncategorized

Advice For The Rational Man

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

How do I know that the World’s Only Rational Man is my junior? Look at him applying a logical methodology to a matter of political history. Of course FDR didn’t mean anything like the scientific method when he set about tinkering with the US Constitution and economy. Any superficial appearance of such was merely a sales pitch.

Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Oscar Wilde

WORM, know that bureaucrat is French for ‘zombie’. You know what you have to do.

Category: Blogging

EXCLUSIVE: Murkowski’s Libertarian Effort Is Led by Longtime Palin Enemy

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 43 Comments

Early Wednesday morning, Alaska Libertarian Party chairman Scott Kohlhaas got a call from ex-Republican Andrew Halcro, asking if Kohlhaas would be open to having Sen. Lisa Murkowski replace Dave Haase as the LP’s Senate candidate.

Such a switch would be the only option for Murkowksi to be on the Nov. 2 ballot, should she and the National Republican Senatorial Committee fail in their effort to overturn conservative challenger Joe Miller’s 1,668-vote victory in Tuesday’s primary.

A former Republican state legislator, Halcro has disavowed any “official” connection to the Murkowski campaign, but a source in Anchorage says Halcro has masterminded the effort to secure the LP nomination for the incumbent Republican senator as a fallback option, should Miller’s victory hold up. And Halcro acknowledged to an Anchorage Daily News reporter that he is in direct communication with Murkowski.

Major national media have quoted Halcro without noting that, after Sarah Palin won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2006, Halcro launched a third-party vengeance campaign focused on attcking Palin. He finished with 9% of the vote, and subsequently launched a blog which made him a “folk hero” to Palin’s enemies, according to an Anchorage Daily News article published in August 2008 — just two weeks before Palin was picked as the GOP vice-presidential nominee.

The New York Times extensively quoted Halcro in a story Wednesday without detailing his anti-Palin animus:

“The Murkowski campaign just did not attack, and these guys are bullies,” said Andrew Halcro, a former state lawmaker and candidate for governor who is now a political consultant. “The Tea Party people are bullies. From his introductory spot to all of the Tea Party spots, they were all scorched earth.”
Mr. Halcro, who supported Ms. Murkowski but did not work on her campaign, said he was aware that Ms. Murkowski’s advisers had debated how to respond.
“At the end of the day it was we weren’t going to give credence to his message by responding,” Mr. Halcro said. “But when somebody’s whacking away at your kneecaps consistently for weeks, you’re going to start to wobble.”

Halcro is now reported to be teaming up with Anchorage pollster David Dittman to conduct a poll testing how Murkowski would fare as a Libertarian candidate.

Erick Erickson of Red State wrote this morning that Murkowski has offered the LP “a sizeable chunk” of her more than $1 million in campaign cash in return for the Libertarian nomination. My source in Anchorage says the Miller team has had no direct contact with Libertarian Party officials, although many grassroots supporters of Miller have spoken to Kohlhaas and Haase.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl has two long reports today about the Alaska situation:

I’ll have more in a little while, but first I have to change out of my pajamas, go buy some smokes and get some more coffee. Remember, I’m still rattling the tip-jar for next week’s planned Alaska trip.

UPDATE II: Vodkapundit on GOP tactics: “It’s almost as if they’re trying to lose.” The sad thing is, why do the worst people always seem to have the Big Money on their side? One of the commenters who lives in Alaska describes Palin-hater Halcro as “a smarmy little richboy scumsucking RINO” and another calls our attention to this photo of the PDS sufferer:

Pathetic looking, isn’t he? Instapundit had a roundup of Alaska Senate news this morning and didn’t link here, but did link our friend Sissy Willis, who also has a roundup. The other day, Rush Limbaugh had an excellent rant about Murkowski as a “Ruling Class RINO.”

UPDATE III: Ace is in fine foaming fury over the NRSC’s intervention. BTW, I don’t know Erick Erickson’s sources are, but he’s gone much further than I have in stating definitively that Team Murkowski has offered to buy the LP Senate nomination. I’ve hinted in that direction, but I don’t know for a fact that such an offer has been made. Anchorage seems to be a political Peyton Place filled with two-bit Machiavellis, doesn’t it?

Category: Alaska, Election, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Senate

‘Stalled Recovery’

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 16 Comments

That’s the the L.A. Times euphemism for “depression”:

Downward revision of GDP growth
a strong signal of stalled recovery
The Commerce Department on Friday downgraded the nation’s economic growth in the second quarter, providing the most important evidence yet that the recovery has stalled.
The anemic annualized growth rate of 1.6% was down from last month’s estimate of 2.4%. The drop was slightly less than many economists had predicted, but the report still put an exclamation point on a week of bad economic news that has raised fears the nation could plunge into another recession.

Which is to say, we’ve had the dead-cat bounce and are now in, or at least approaching, the second half of a W-shaped (“double-dip”) recession. The New York Times briefly summarizes other indicators:

The news came at the end of a week that showed the economic retrenchment that began in the second quarter has spilled over into the summer. Existing home sales in July were down to their lowest level in a decade, and sales of new homes that month were at their lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1963. Orders for large factory goods, excluding the volatile transportation sector, dropped in July, indicating that recovery in the manufacturing sector is also stalling.

“Bailout Ben” Bernanke gave a speech at Jackson Hole, Wyo., this morning that appears to have pleased Wall Street. As of about 11:20 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up more than 115 points, but the economic problem isn’t on Wall Street, it’s on Main Street.

Category: Economics

Western Alphabetic Imperialism: An Opportunity For Ivory Tower Conquest

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 9 Comments

Special guest post by Esarhaddon Q. Echinacea-Prügel

News may have reached your ear concerning the demise in fluency with traditional writing systems besetting Far Eastern cultures. Those noble logograms, each its own separate piece of art, represent exactly the sort of quixotic, emotional, faux-romantic struggle against reason to which all Critical Theory aspires, before blaming the disastrous consequences upon the sane majority of society. The time is ripe for a conservative stealth takeover, followed by a revolution to destroy Critical Theory. Read more

Category: Farce

I Remember That Flick

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

Power Line points to possibly self-referential research showing that Americans are stupid, based upon doubts about elected leadership. The astroturf seems to work as follows:

. . .Egan thinks Republicans are dumb. But let’s take a closer look. His 46 percent is an unpublished number from a Time magazine survey that is described in a Politico article to which he links.

Wasn’t Simone more cute with this chain of reference?

Um, he’s sick. My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.

The JournoList coordination evidence may be forthcoming.
Bonus: Ben Stein from the same flick for the real source of angst:

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the…
Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the…
Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?… raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work?
Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this.
Anyone know what this is? Class?
Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve.
Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980?
Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. “Voodoo” economics.

Category: Economics, Power Line

Politics Is Attrition Warfare

Posted on | August 27, 2010 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

[Updated: fix date flub]
Finley Peter Dunne famously noted that “politics ain’t beanbag”. Frequently, it boils down to stamina and reinforcements. Whoever remains standing when the resources are exhausted is the winner. The principles involved in the question may or may not matter. How many times have you seen a politician on a network completely ignore an important, but inconvenient question?

The NY-23 election earlyier this last year remains a case study in how a rotten establishment can outlast and possibly circumvent the will of the people. I say possibly, because the Tea Party hasn’t fully steeped. Sam Foster calls the GOP unrepentant for how they are failing to support Doug Hoffman:

. . .Mr. Sickler came up with two important reasons for backing Matt Doheny. He felt that Doheny was the more rounded candidate. More importantly, he and his contemporaries still harbored a grudge against Doug Hoffman for having bucked Scozzafava’s coronation. The local kingmakers desired a more…loyal candidate.

If Republicans are looking for a loyalist, then Doheny is their Manchurian Candidate in disguise. He proved himself to be quite the party lapdog by going along with the candidacy of Dede Scozzafava and financially supporting her election bid with the highest donation allowed by law. Stepping even further, he turned down the chance to run on the Conservative Party ticket ahead of Doug Hoffman, sacrificing his so-called conservative ideals in exchange for not “alienating the Republican Party.”

Here is the point, and I think this generalizes beyond NY-23 to the rest of the country: the GOP won’t take the Tea Party seriously until the Tea Party is the GOP.

Anyone can get a blog, vent the spleen, gather a cohort, make some signs, heap verbal abuse upon officials, go home, and fume because they have been ignored. The Left’s strategy has first and foremost been to ignore and minimize Tea Parties, moving on to slander and marginalization as a secondary tactic. Hoffman’s cold shoulder experience in NY-23 is similar to DeVore in California, and Miller in Alaska.

So, while I met Doug Hoffman at CPAC this year, admire his courage, and support his candidacy, the sad play-by-play laid out in Foster’s article is unsurprising in every particular. Not only is politics attrition warfare, citizenship is not a spectator sport. The current crisis has been bred by lack of participation by a vast chunk of the electorate. Including me.

Get off the beanbag and support your local version of Doug Hoffman, or your sins of omission will result in a pocket-picking, and you’ll be at fault.

Category: New York, Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Alaska LP Senate Candidate Dave Haase Is ‘Huge Sarah Palin Fan’

Posted on | August 26, 2010 | 28 Comments

Libertarian Party sources in Anchorage say they’ve been deluged with phone calls today from media and “political types” asking about the LP line on the ballot, which is Lisa Murkowski’s only hope to remain in the Senate unless her NRSC lawyer can find a way to steal the GOP nomination from Joe Miller.

Murkowski’s supporters “want us to keep an open mind and not say ‘no’ immediately” to their suggestion that LP Senate nominee Dave Haase step aside and let the incumbent Republican senator run as the Libertarian candidate on the Nov. 2 ballot.

In an e-mail Thursday to Ace of Spades HQ contributor Drew M., Haase praised Murkowski as a “smart lady” and said he had voted for her in the GOP primary.

However, the person who might be most able to sway Haase’s decision is none other than Sarah Palin.

“He’s a huge Sarah Palin fan,” the source in Anchorage said of Haase. The idea that the LP candidate admires both Murkowski and Palin — who are bitter political rivals — might “seem kinda weird,” the source said, but Haase is “a unique individual” who is “open to anybody who is open to his message.” Haase advocates the abolition of both the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve.

Would it make a difference if Palin herself were to contact Alaska Libertarian Party officials directly? The source said such a call “would likely make a difference.” With the LP suddenly in the middle of the nation’s biggest election battle, one call from “Mama Grizzly” might prove decisive.

Palin has a long-standing friendship with Alaska’s Libertarians. In 2005 and 2006, the source said, the future governor attended two LP meetings at the Denny’s restaurant in Anchorage as a guest speaker. During the last few weeks of the 2006 election, the leadership of the Alaska LP endorsed Palin for governor.

UPDATE: You’ll notice some snarky know-it-all in the comments quoting two-day-old reporting about the Alaska LP. The actual situation behind the scenes is complicated, chaotic and subject to change. While rounding up the Miller-Murkowski news at The American Spectator this morning, I came across this:

Meanwhile, Alaska Libertarian chairman Scott Kohlhass told KTUU in Anchorage that if Haase were to step aside as the party’s candidate, the choice of Haase’s replacement would be up to the LP executive committee.

Get it? Although it’s Haase’s decision whether or not to step aside, the choice of Haase’s replacement in such a scenario would be made by the executive committee, of which Kohlhaas is a member. I’d be remiss if I failed to point out that (a) Libertarians are firm believers in free-market capitalism, and (b) at last count, the Murkowski campaign had $1.8 million cash on hand.

Like I said, this is complicated.

BTW, thanks to everyone who has hit the tip jar so far to help send me up to Alaska. It’s past 3 a.m., and I’m too tired to give you a rundown on prospective travel plans and thank everyone individually at this point, but we’re definitely getting there. Mrs. Other McCain talked to me Thursday evening about the family budget. Just keep it coming, y’all.

Category: Ace of Spades, Alaska, Election, Joe Miller, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Senate
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