Bill Whittle’s Sam Cohen interview on Afterburner is important viewing. Look for the Going Nuclear I & II links under Afterburner.
Cohen is the inventor of the neutron bomb. The first segment is interesting, the second shocking for his stone-cold chilling analysis of where things are headed.
One defers to the wisdom of such genius as Cohen’s. Perhaps I’m a naive. Why I doubt that there will be any usage of nukes except in the case of (a) truly unhinged actors or (b) external forces threatening a regime with imminent destruction are:
The nuclear Rubicon is a one-way crossing. Unlike so many others actions across Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (DIME) facets of interaction, the control freaks who have them lose control of the dice once they are cast. The strutting, posturing, threatening, and brinksmanship all come to an end once over the brink.
Given the existing war crimes debate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world retribution against whoever lays down the next glass parking lot promises to be immense. Whoever goes there, assuming survival, is likely to wish they’d met their demise. And that’s irrespective of the weapon size.
Actual leaders who take their responsibilities seriously and live in the real world don’t enjoy the luxury of thinking out loud in a consequence-free blog post. The first bullet point above is why leaders from representative democracies don’t go around threatening each other; it’s a lose-lose proposition.
Republican politics in South Carolina has been a rough sport since the era of the legendary Lee Atwater, but the dirty games have descended to a new low in the past 10 days.
On May 24, GOP consultant/blogger Will Folks claimed that he had an “inappropriate” relationship in 2007 with Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, who had surged to the front of the four-candidate primary field after being endorsed by Sarah Palin.
Folks was unable to substantiate his accusation, which seemed likely to fade away until Wednesday when — mere hours before the final televised debate leading into next Tuesday’s primary — a campaign staffer for one of Haley’s GOP rivals claimed that he had a one-night stand with Haley in 2008.
Larry Marchant, the latest accuser, is a consultant and lobbyist who was reportedly asked to resign Wednesday from the campaign of Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know: (a) Haley’s mentor, Gov. Mark Sanford, escaped impeachment after admitting an affair with an Argentine woman, and (b) after Bauer called for Sanford’s impeachment, Bauer was accused of being gay.
This story has more twists than a package of Ramen noodles.
An adviser to the Barrett campaign, which has been accused of shopping the affair rumors about Haley, sent a story about the new allegation to reporters shortly after the news broke Wednesday.
Yeah. Honor.
UPDATE III: This video clip highlights the deer-in-the-headlights expression on Bauer’s face after Nikki called him out:
UPDATE IV: Feeling pretty well vindicated for having pointed the finger at Bauer, Erick Erickson says:
Thus we see Andre Bauer’s entire campaign strategy — ignore the issues, ignore the experience, and go straight to calling Nikki Haley a whore. I really and truly hope South Carolina voters will not reward the man for something so disgusting.
Announcement here.
“I will smite that knave with my Massaponax,” said Mike, after one too many Kenneth Branagh movies. In this exclusive clip, we glimpse Mike and his campaign team working on his planned 25 October kickoff:Because, when you’re that eloquent, you don’t need a teleprompter.
Kudos to Megyn Kelly for tolerating this ludicrous pettifogger so long. She has done her homework; the Reverend, not so much. At one point in his recitation of canned talking points, he entreats Arizona to rejoin the Union. Did somebody goose him with the notion that SB1070 was an act of secession?Reverend Jackson, you’re 69 years old this year, per Wikipedia. I’m not sure whether it was age, illness, or the sheer distraction of getting thrashed by Megyn, but you were barely intelligible. I submit that a shift to retirement planning may be worth considering.
Bauer had paid Marchant’s Black Label Strategies $21,361 since he formally opened his campaign account for governor in October. He also paid Black Label $29,099 in 2009, according to campaign finance reports.
Folks, Marchant and Bauer have had business relationships. Long-time Bauer advisor Rod Shealy hired Folks in 2006 to work for former state Treasurer Thomas Ravenel’s campaign. Folks said Wednesday that Marchant also hired him to work on school-choice issues but that work ended in 2005.
The political ties between Folks and Marchant make their claims tougher to believe, said Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffmon. . . .
“More names with no more proof is certainly going to make it look like Nikki Haley is under attack,” Huffmon said. “It’s probably going to end up, in the mind of the public, needing a higher level of proof.
“What we have irrefutable evidence of in South Carolina is political incest.”
Nikki Haley has a family; and her family, her children, hear these stories. These political operatives show an absolute callous disregard for her life. A friend of mine mentioned the deep misogyny involved here and that Will Folks, in particular, has a history of misogyny and objectification of women in both his writing and his actions. Where are the feminists? Oh right, she’s a Republican.
A lobbyist who resigned from a rival political campaign is claiming to have had a tryst with a South Carolina lawmaker trying to become the state’s first female governor. . . .
Marchant says their one-night stand happened in 2008 during a trip to Utah.
7:20 p.m. ET: OK, as readers might guess, this was the “very interesting report” I’d heard earlier about Larry Marchant’s resignation from the Andre Bauer campaign: Marchant had gone to media outlets telling them this story and, when Bauer found out about it, Marchant got the ax.
We’ll wait to see how this plays out, but frankly it looks to me as if Haley’s enemies have become desperate to destroy her. It seems to me that voters in South Carolina now must ask themselves which of two things was true: Either (a) Haley was just spreadin’ the love around to every GOP operative in South Carolina, or (b) she is the victim of a vicious smear campaign.
My guess is that they’ll believe (b).
7:45 p.m. ET: A South Carolina reader sends me this photo:
According to the reader, this shows Bauer’s campaign bus parked in front of Larry Marchant’s office at 4 p.m. Wednesday — four hours after Marchant supposedly resigned from the campaign.
Say this about South Carolina Republicans: They’re world champions at campaign shenanigans.
7:55 p.m. ET: In December, Larry Marchant was busted for DUI. Of course, just because he’s a drunk driver doesn’t mean he’s the kind of backstabbing scumbag who would lie about shagging a Republican gubernatorial candidate, but . . .
At this point I half-hope that all these charges against her are true, just because that’d actually be less depressing than the thought of this many lying scumbags running around South Carolina smearing innocent people.
Republican gubernatorial hopeful Andre Bauer said today he has asked for and received the resignation of a political consultant for “inappropriate conduct” but would say little more.
Lt. Gov. Bauer announced that adviser Larry Marchant gave him his resignation at noon today.
Bauer said he had become aware of a situation several days ago, and reached the conclusion that decisive action was dictated.
Astute readers will recall when it was first suggested those close to the Bauer campaign had a role in pushing the Folks allegations against Nikki Haley. It was a commenter who pointed me to one connection, and now the same source blogs:
Evidently the connections we made here and here are started to get some heads rolling.
Of course, we don’t know that Marchant was involved, but absent any other explanation, the shadow of suspicion now looms.
Bauer is currently being advised by longtime confidant Rod Shealy, Sr. and Columbia lobbyist/ consultant Larry Marchant.
So now, amid the Folks-Haley imbroglio, Marchant is asked to resign for “inappropriate conduct.” To quote Allahpundit: Hmmmmm.
UPDATE II: If what I just heard about Marchant’s resignation is true . . . oh, boy. But I got it third-hand, so I’ll have to keep you wondering. When I told one source that I’d heard a very interesting report, the source replied, “Well, whatever it is, I won’t be surprised. It’s South Carolina.”
[Y]ou had to sign your contract by April 30th and close by June 30th in order to get your $8000 if you’re a first time buyer and $6500 if you’re a move up buyer.
And then came May, traditionally the height of the spring housing season.
Mortgage applications to purchase a home began to sink. Now, four weeks later, mortgage purchase applications are down nearly 40 percent from a month ago to their lowest level since April of 1997. . . .
Read the whole thing. The point is that this one-time injection of federal money into the housing market is like “Cash for Clunkers” — essentially buying short-term economic “good news” that won’t last because such artificial intervention does nothing to address the underlying economic fundamentals. And to once again borrow Michelle Malkin’s famous phrase, the fundamentals suck.
It is profoundly discouraging that we’ve returned to this kind of Keynesian gimmickry, which so obviously didn’t work in the 1970s and isn’t going to work now.
What’s the point of winning the “war of ideas” when the guys who lost that war are now running the government and acting as if the war had never been fought?
Will Folks claimed he was pressured to admit his extramarital affair with South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley last week because of a soon-to-be-broken news story detailing his “inappropriate physical relationship” with the Republican. But, a week later, that damning newspaper article is nowhere to be found. . . .
On his website, Folks insinuates the Columbia Free-Times newspaper was about to break a story about his affair with Haley, and indeed the newspaper itself has admitted one of its reporters did investigate such a rumor. But according to one knowledgeable source, while a Free-Times reporter did talk to Folks on May 13, no story was ever budgeted to run that week.
The reason? The Daily Caller has learned that around the time Sarah Palin endorsed Haley at a Columbia rally, an attorney for the paper advised editors not to run the story because the paper only had one source alleging the affair.
Oh, and speaking of stories that didn’t pan out, Pappas interviewed Erick Erickson at Red State, who explained that his”we know who paid Will Folks” non-story fizzled because South Carolina sources stopped returning his phone calls.
I’ve had a similar problem the past few days. People in South Carolina who seemed ready last week to dish dirt on Will Folks have stopped talking. Maybe they decided there’s no need to take the scorched-earth approach, since Folks has done such a fine job of discrediting himself.
What a douchebag — Will Folks, that is, not Ace. And this transparent attempt to hustle a book deal (tentative title, Honey, I Shtupped the Candidate) out of his own rumor-mongering is pathetic. Ace hat-tips Jim Geraghty’s Twitter.
The former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida has been arrested for allegedly running a scam bilking money from the party.
The Florida Department of Law enforcement took Jim Greer into custody Wednesday at his Orlando-area home.
The 47-year-old has been charged with six counts of organized scheme to defraud, four counts of felony grand theft and one count of money laundering.
Also, Greer is guilty of backing two-faced crapweasel Charlie Crist.
Greer was arrested by Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents this morning at his Oviedo home about 9:15 a.m. and booked into the Seminole County jail about 45 minutes later.
At a lunchtime press conference in Orlando, Statewide Prosecutor William Shepherd said Greer developed a scheme to take money from the Republican Party through a shell company he created, Victory Strategies. He used the money for his personal expenses — at least $100,000, Shepherd said. . . .
Greer was backed for the chairmanship job in 2006 by then-Gov. elect Charlie Crist, and an Orlando Sentinel analysis of party spending found Greer dramatically increased spending and the use of American Express charge cards during his three-year tenure.
The high spending, frequent national travel, and Greer’s decision to endorse Crist in his U.S. Senate primary against Marco Rubio ultimately prompted party leaders to seek his ouster.
His $465,000 home, finished in early 2006, is a showplace: 3,700 square feet, with a wine cellar, swimming pool and a two-story entry that features a sweeping, curved staircase and chandelier. He also owns two others: a $240,000 condo and $125,000 town house, both at the beach in Brevard County. He bought a plane, although he’s not a pilot. His children . . . had a live-in nanny. He drives a black Mercedes-Benz, his wife a white Lincoln Navigator.
