At the Scott Brown Victory Celebration, Old Ebbitt Grill

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by Smitty

Stacy and I are at the Old Ebbitt Grill for the Scott Brown victory celebration.

This is an important test of the team blogging concept.

The crowd is festive, the brew is cold and the venue lacking room for this many attractive conservatives.
The staffers, of course, don’t show up on digital film, but we can show you a few other attendees. Stacy will update this post later with actual names, as I lack his impressive memory for people who can buy beer with facts.

The Nokia97 in the previous photo is a jolly good modem, and we’ve got two SD cards for the Barbie Cam, in all its bubble-gum glory. Thus, at CPAC next month, we should be able to get our blog on, irrespective of any room crunches on Blogger Row. Because we’re tough like that. Tougher still, now, will be if we can get Da Tech Guy on scene. I’m told that he can improve the bandwidth of a cel phone modem with a special Sicilian hand rub, though I am privately dubious on the point.Very quickly, before the battery dies on me, this blog would like to offer a large thank you to Shannon Burns of Victory Solutions, a fine host and American.

The Battle of Fitchburg: More About the Pro-Life Fight in Massachusetts

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The day I left Massachusetts last week, Da Tech Guy picked up his local newspaper in Fitchburg and learned that Planned Parenthood was planning to open a clinic on Main Street — funded by federal stimulus money. 

The Battle of Fitchburg is rapidly becoming a national cause for the pro-life movement. Da Tech Guy post photos of today’s protests and the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise reports:

Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Melanie Lown said Wednesday that Planned Parenthood officials did not want to comment on today’s planned protest.
“We have made that decision, but we are looking forward to going to the City Council meeting on Feb. 2,” Lown said.
Planned Parenthood officials were invited to the Feb. 2 meeting after a contentious meeting last week during which six city councilors voted to draft a resolution urging Planned Parenthood not to come to Fitchburg.
But Marie Sturgis, executive director of Mass Citizens for Life, was unmoved by [Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts CEO Dianne] Luby’s assertion that no abortions will be performed in Fitchburg.
“They will be doing abortion referrals no doubt, because that’s a very important piece of what they do,” Sturgis said. . . .
State Rep. Stephen DiNatale, D-Fitchburg, said the protest shows that Planned Parenthood “just raises a lot of issues for the community.”
“And we don’t have any say in it,” said DiNatale, who supported the City Council resolution.

USA Today noticed today and pro-life blogger Paul Anthony Melanson wrote:

 Whatever became of President Obama’s decision to disallow a “family planning provision” from the economic stimulus package?

Indeed. Because federal taxpayer dollars are involved, the Battle of Fitchburg is everybody’s fight. Planned Parenthood’s Dianne Luby doesn’t think pro-lifers are serious:

“I think it is common that people don’t want protesters and those types of things that sometimes occur when we go into a community, but as soon as anti-choice folks realize we don’t provide abortion services there, they don’t protest.”
She used the organization’s Somerville location as an example.
“We had protesters at that location for one day and now we have no protesters,” she said.

Protesters for one day? I don’t know about Somerville, but I spent six days in Fitchburg. It’s a tough blue-collar town and I don’t expect the pro-life people there will give up without a fight. Massachusetts pro-lifer Jay G. explains the rationale of today’s protest:

One purpose is to make the prospective landlord and business people and other neighbors very uncomfortable about having such a death dealing and controversial tenant moving into downtown Fitchburg.

My money says the Battle of Fitchburg will end with Planned Parenthood in full retreat.

Send Da Tech Guy to CPAC!

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Da Tech Guy interviews Vietnam veteran Randy May at a Scott Brown rally Jan. 17 in Boston.

The trademark Sicilian hand gestures. The ubiquitous fedoras. Trust me, we need Da Tech Guy at CPAC.

He’s a proud man who works hard to support his family. He got laid off from his IT job more than a year ago, but keeps plugging away, doing computer repairs and other freelance tech work. During the Massachusetts Senate campaign, he not only let me crash on his sofa for six days, but also put about 600 miles on his car, while interviewing dozens of voters in a sort of one-man focus-group operation.

Before I left Massachusetts a week ago, I told him that if he’d create a PayPal account, I’d make sure the tip-jar hitters sent him to CPAC. He said, “I need $800 a week, plus expenses.” And today, I noticed he’d created the “Do It Myself Fund.”

CPAC starts Feb. 18 and I figure if we can get him $1,600 by Feb. 13 –which is 16 days from now — he’ll make it. That’s $100 a day. A piece of cake, if our readers will be as good to him as you’ve been to me. Remember when you hit Da Tech Guy’s tip jar to put “CPAC” in the subject line of the PayPal form.

If you’ll give him an extra $20, maybe he’ll bring some cannoli.

E-Mail From a Reader

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“The President should have prefaced his State of the Union speech with a profound moment of silence, recognizing the many thousands who died tragically in Haiti. Instead, Haiti was practically a footnote in his speech, and the point he made at the expense of all that unspeakable horror was basically how awesome we are. Obama ran for office under the banner of “regaining our standing in the world.” Sadly, he instead advertised to the world what a bunch of shallow, naval-gazing schmucks we are, and how we lack the wisdom to discern what’s truly important in life — and what isn’t.”
— reader e-mail

Also Haiti-related: Picking up an item I linked in the headlines, The Duke of Blunt ponders “The Folly of Compassion for the Sake of Compassion.”

The long-term plight of Haiti and the appropriate response are worth considering as issues going forward but in the meantime, we must do what we can to ease the the immediate suffering.

While I was in Massachusetts, I got a $20 tip-jar hit from Adrienne who told me to buy Da Tech Guy beers for the trouble of putting up with me. (Not to mention Dan Collins.) Then Da Tech Guy took me to mass with him Sunday and the priest made an appeal for Haiti relief, so I put the $20 in the basket.

It’s OK. I’m not Catholic and Da Tech Guy doesn’t drink beer anyway. If the situation in Port au Prince ever improves to the point that relief workers decide the suffering Haitians could use a cold brew — hey, guys, this Bud’s for you.

UPDATE: Speaking of Da Tech Guy, he has photos of today’s protest against Planned Parenthood’s federally-funded effort to open a clinic in Fitchburg, which I blogged about this morning.

‘I Forgot Chris Matthews Was White’

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Raina Kelley of Newsweek had the blog post title of the day. She’s not the only MSM type noticing Vanilla McTingly’s awkward SOTU moment:

  • Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I can sympathize with the risks of talking on national TV for a living, but . . . that’s disturbing. Not said with bad intent, perhaps, but strange that he thought he had to go there with so much else to be said.”
  • Brian Montopoli, CBS News: “Speaking to Rachel Maddow later in the evening, Matthews clarified the comments, saying he was ‘very proud’ he made them.”
  • Steve Padilla, Los Angeles Times: “Well, at least he didn’t say President Obama doesn’t speak with a Negro dialect.”
  • Rachel Netter, ABC News: “Matthews quickly tried to clarify his comments on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ by saying he was simply proud that race seemed to have no place in Wednesday’s address, but the initial comment reflects the racial taunts and innuendos that have punctuated Obama’s first year in office.”

“Taunts and innuendos”? Maybe my dog-whistle hearing has failed.  Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic (whose blog post title is a close second to Raina Kelley’s) plumbs the clogged-up toilet of Matthews’ mind:

But I think it’s most worth noting that “I forgot Obama was black” — in all its iterations — is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest. . . .
In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white. . . .
At some point that number of white people who still can’t get their heads around our humanity will have to accept the truth: the president is black, even if you don’t quite know what that means.

Coates strays a bit toward identity-politics indignation in that post, but I can relate to the felt need to represent when dealing with a dishonest insult. It’s the “don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” reaction, and I can certainly sympathize with Coates’ rage at being patronized by the Pillsbury Doughboy.

VIDEO: Adam Andrzejewski on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Show

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Instapundit hit Andrzejewski’s money-bomb last night and Lech Walesa will campaign for Andrzejewski tomorrow in Chicago.

Hey, who told you about this guy first, huh?

UPDATE: Dude! One of Andrzejewski’s Republican opponents for governor appeared in a campaign ad for Barack Obama:

UPDATE II: Lech Walesa will appear Friday at a 2:30 p.m. Tea Party at Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Building. We await Rachel Maddow’s pronouncement that Walesa — a Nobel Prize winner — is a “teabagger.”

UPDATE III: Erick Erickson at Red State:

This guy is an American success story. He’s the type of guy we always say we want in politics, but then ignore once he enters the arena. Except this time people are not ignoring him.

Read the whole thing. This guy could be another Scott Brown.

The President Sends Me E-Mails

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Once you’re on his list, you get ’em all the time:

Robert:
I just finished delivering my first State of the Union, and I wanted to send you a quick note.
We face big and difficult challenges. Change on the scale we seek does not come easily. But I will never accept second place for the United States of America.
That is why I called for a robust jobs bill without delay. It’s why I proposed a small businesses tax credit, new investments in infrastructure, and pushed for climate legislation to create a clean energy economy.
It’s why we’re taking on big banks, reforming Wall Street, revitalizing our education system, increasing transparency — and finishing the job on health insurance reform.
It’s why I need your help — because I am determined to fight to defend the middle class, and special interest lobbyists will go all out to fight us.
Help me show that the American people are ready to join this fight for the middle class — add your name to a letter to Congress today:
http://my.barackobama.com/SOTU
We have finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But we don’t quit. I don’t quit.
Let’s seize this moment — to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.
President Barack Obama

The e-mail had a big “donate” button at the bottom. Speaking of which, have you hit the tip jar lately? Like the man said, “seize this moment.”