Category Archives: Republicans

Fast and Furious and Very Confusing

29 Replies

Some of my readers have evinced an interest in this Fast and Furious thing that is causing such a stir in Washington. Seeking to learn more about it, I started reading the results of a six-month investigation into the case by Fortune magazine. It left me more or less as confused as I was before.

An excerpt:

As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that “the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again.”

There’s the rub.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)

“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.

The ATF’s accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn’t actually exist. “It gets back to something basic for me,” says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). “Terry was murdered, and guns from this operation were found at his murder site.” A spokesman for Issa denies that politics has played a role in the congressman’s actions and says “multiple individuals across the Justice Department’s component agencies share responsibility for the failure that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious.” Issa’s spokesman asserts that even if ATF agents followed prosecutors’ directives, “the practice is nonetheless gun walking.” Attorneys for Dodson declined to comment on the record…

A bit further down, I find a description of the thing that has confused me the most about this case, and all the GOP indignation over it:

Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal…

Actually, Wawa IS pretty amazing

22 Replies

Let’s set aside for a moment whether Mitt Romney was having a “Bush at the checkout” moment of cluelessness, or celebrating technology that denies jobs to the working class, or any of that stuff.

The bottom line for me is that Wawas are pretty amazing.

Have you ever been to one? I have, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is unlike any other Interstate exit/convenience store/gas station/fast food experience I’ve ever had. I wish I could have taken my late father-in-law to one. Since he was in the convenience-store business in Memphis, he would have fully appreciated it.

It’s a sort of Alice’s Restaurant “you can get anything you want” experience, laid out in an attractive and accessible manner.

The last time I stopped at one, the manager told me that Wawa was about to open some stores in South Carolina. Has anyone seen one down here yet? (If so, they’re not included on this store locator, which indicates they are only to be found in DE. MD, NJ, PA and VA.)

Of Graham, taxes, Norquist and unicorns

41 Replies

I was a bit out of the loop last week, and missed this:

As a conservative Republican, Lindsey Graham has never had a problem promising not to raise taxes.  Like almost every other Republican member of Congress, he has signed the anti-tax pledge put forth by Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform.

But now Graham says the debt crisis is so severe that the tax pledge — which says no tax loopholes can be eliminated unless every dollar raised by closing  loopholes goes to tax cuts — has got to go.

“When you eliminate a deduction, it’s okay with me to use some of that money to get us out of debt. That’s where I disagree with the pledge,” said Graham…

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But it sent Grover Norquist into orbit, ranting about unicorns:

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, is none too pleased.

“This was a brain fart, not a real idea,” he told me in a phone conversation just now. “It doesn’t scare me. I think what he was doing was answering a hypothetical question to show how hypothetically open-minded he was about something.”…

He said the Senator was making the same mistake Ronald Reagan made in 1982 and George H.W. Bush did in 1990: believing congressional Democrats who promise a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, in this case four-to-one.

“Pinocchio was told by the fox and cat that this would be” a good idea, Norquist said. He lampooned Graham for being disconnected from the reality of fiscal negotiations, comparing him to his three-year-old daughter.

“It’s like having that conversation about what color unicorn you like, while in the back of your mind you know there’s no such thing. ‘Grover, why don’t you like green ones?’ But there aren’t any ones! I have a three year old who says this a lot. She has green unicorns, but we don’t need them in the Senate.”…

I’m not sure exactly what he means, but he seems to be saying that presuming to actually deliberate with the other member of the Congress who, although of a different party, were elected just as legitimately to that body as Graham was (you know, as the Framers of the Constitution envisioned), is as fantastic and ridiculous as the existence of unicorns.

Is that how you read it?

There is the world envisioned by the Framers, and then that envisioned by Grover Norquist. In the latter, all elected representatives do exactly what Grover Norquist tells them to do. I prefer the former.

Turnout was so low (11.85%), not even I voted

32 Replies

I’m embarrassed to admit that, because I don’t think it’s happened since the first time I was eligible to vote in 1972. But I was not in town Tuesday, and when I tried to determine last week what I would be missing so that I could vote absentee, I was frustrated.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything, beyond the opportunity to register a symbolic  protest vote against Joe Wilson. I guess I could have voted for my neighbor Bill Banning for county treasurer. But you know, I haven’t the slightest idea whether he or incumbent Jim Eckstrom (who won easily) would have been better in the post. Which is the main reason why the position should not be elective.

Oh, as for my bid to find out what I was missing — I went to the project Vote Smart site to check and see what would be on the ballot in my precinct, and ran into two problems: There were no county races listed, and I think the state House district was wrong. At least, Kenny Bingham recently told me that I  had been drawn into his district, and Vote Smart still had me in Rick Quinn’s. So I don’t know. In any case, neither had serious opposition that I heard about.

Add to that the mess with all the challengers thrown off the ballot, and I was pretty sure (and still am) that I was missing no significant opportunities.

Still, I feel bad about it. And I’m not consoled by knowing that almost no one else voted (turnout was a record-low 11.85 percent of eligible citizens). I’ve never considered myself to be in the same category as voting slackers. I suppose next I’m going to take up watching reality TV 10 hours a day.

Anyway, a few brief observations about what did happen:

  • After all the coverage she got, Kara Gormley Meador’s bid to become a newsmaker came to nothing. The few voters who showed agreed with The State and stuck with Ronnie Cromer.
  • Aside from that, there are indications that if all those people hadn’t been thrown off the ballot, some of them would have won. As The State noted, “Just nine senators and 14 House members faced primary challengers – including the four House members vying for two seats – in a year when all 170 legislative seats are up for election.” But of those 23 with opposition, six lost. That indicates the mood was right for some change.
  • All those Democratic bigwigs who endorsed Preston Brittain were utterly ignored by the almost solidly black Democratic primary electorate of the new 7th congressional district. To put it in brutally frank terms, Andre Bauer or whoever wins the runoff is probably going to be happy to run against a candidate named Tinubu who was distinguished in the primary as being the one endorsed by the AFL-CIO. But what there still is of the Democratic “establishment” in SC may be pinning its hopes on a challenge to the result. Oddly, they’re not saying Brittain had the votes; they’re saying that if Vick’s votes had been counted, he’d be in a runoff (remember Vick, who self-destructed?). So. Stay tuned.
  • One good bit of news: Gwen Kennedy will not be on Richland County Council any more.

Y’all have any other thoughts to share? Let’s have ’em.

Report: Myers says JAKE left the Scotch in his car

17 Replies

Image from videotape, at WISTV.com.

At least, that was his first story, according to this report from WIS. Then, he blamed it on “that lady”:

LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC (WIS) – Eleventh Circuit Solicitor Donnie Myers finds himself facing new alcohol charges after a South Carolina Highway Patrolman stopped the elected official last month on suspicions of driving under the influence…

“When you pulled out in front of me over here on before we got to Old Cherokee, you were swerve — you were driving down the middle of the road,” Alveshire told Myers.

“You know why?” Myers asks the trooper, “Because I was listening to the Carolina game and it’s good stuff,” Myers said.

“You had anything to drink?” the trooper asks. “Yeah, I had a few,” Myers responds.

The trooper tells Myers to walk to the back of his car when he spots a cup inside the car. Alveshire asks the solicitor what’s in the cup, and Myers responds that it’s some scotch that state Sen. Jake Knotts left in the car.

“Hang on a second,” the trooper tells Myers as he pulls out his radio and calls for backup. “Can I get one of y’all down here to Old Cherokee and Old Chapin?”…

Myers spends several minutes leaning on the back of his car as the trooper sits inside his vehicle working on the case. Myers changes his story as to whom the open container of alcohol belongs to. “That was her drink,” Myers yells to the trooper, referring to a woman who pulls up behind the trooper out of view of the camera…

Sounds a bit like that old Maxwell Smart routine: “No? Well, would you believe…?”

I assume there will be “film at 11.” Or videotape, anyway.

No question, Ronald Regan was a great Amercian

7 Replies

OK, now we’re getting into the nit-picking, since this time it was small type way down in a slide, rather than the title of an initiative. And it wasn’t the candidate himself who made either mistake:

First “Amercia,” then “sneak-peak,” and now “Ronald Regan.” No wonder the Romney campaign is searching for a copywriter. (Required skill: “Ability to edit and proof own work.”)

Buzzfeed spotted the latest spelling error from the Romney team on Wednesday after taking a look at a slideshow the campaign’s pollsters put together for bundlers, and the rest of the Web appears to have taken notice. (The Gipper’s last name is spelled Reagan.) Among the international outlets currently running the story: Britain’sTelegraph, Canada’s Star and Ireland’sIndependent.

The typo was in a chart showing the approval ratings of incumbent presidents in the May before their re-election attempt. “Ronald Regan” was noted as having a 53 percent approval rating. (For the record, Obama’s was 47 percent, according to the chart).

But that’s the way it works. Poor ol’ Gerald Ford stumbles once, and the heartless media marketplace labels him a klutz.

For Romney, it looks like it’s gonna be spelling. Sorry, Mitt; them’s the breaks.

Jeb lightly tips hat to Obama, seeks return favor

6 Replies

Not to be outdone by Bill Clinton in the civility department, Jeb Bush has offered some light praise for President Obama:

The brother of the Mr. Obama’s predecessor noted that Mr. Obama had chosen the head of the Chicago public school system, Arne Duncan, as his education secretary and they had worked to focus more on school children and less on the adults running the schools.

“Any time an elected official in the world we’re in today that appears so dysfunctional challenges a core constituency not of their opponent but of their own political base, I think we should pause and give them credit,” Bush said.

The comments came after Rose pointed to comments Bush had made in April praising Duncan and saying the Obama administration had done “a pretty good job” on education policy…

The former politician, who flatly ruled out a run as Mitt Romney’s running mate in the interview, noted that he now has the luxury of being able to say what he thinks and is not constrained by political ambitions.

“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama. I got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong. And I, with civility and respect, I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things that I think he’s done a good job on, I– I’m not gonna just say, ‘no, no,’ ” Bush said…

In his case, though, he’d like to see the compliment returned:

“I think it would help him politically. For example, when he was gracious at the unveiling of the portrait, you know, there’s no way not to be gracious I guess in that kind of setting,” Bush said, referring to a recent ceremony at the White House to unveil the official portrait of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush.

“But it helps,” he said, calling it “just a small acknowledgement that the guy that, you know, that you replaced isn’t the source of every problem that– and– and the excuse of why you’re not being successful I think would help him politically.”…

Actually, I think it would, too — among people like me. But he has to worry about his base.

Unfortunately, to those who are not retired from politics, the other side is the devil these days, and one is never allowed to give the devil his due.

Recall is never a good idea

14 Replies

I didn’t agree with everything that E.J. Dionne said in his column about the failed Wisconsin recall effort, but I was pleased to read this part:

Perhaps the most significant exit poll finding was this one: Only about a quarter of those who went to the polls Tuesday said that a recall was appropriate for any reason. Roughly six in 10 said a recall should be used only in the case of official misconduct. And another tenth thought a recall was never appropriate. Most voters, in other words, rejected the very premise of the election in which they were casting ballots. This proved to be a hurdle too high for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), Walker’s opponent.

Voters should have to live with their bad decisions until the next election, to allow for some order in government — and to lessen the already toxic atmosphere of the perpetual campaign.

If an official does something really heinous, there’s impeachment. But this “make us mad and we’ll have another election” stuff is inimical to our system of representative democracy.

E.J.’s column was about what left and right should learn from Wisconsin. He suggests, although doesn’t say  it overtly, that it would be wrong to think the left has a losing proposition with its support for public employee unions.

But it does. I found this piece, also in the WashPost today, more to the point:

“Anybody, anybody would have been better than Scott Walker,” said Gregory J. Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents workers in more than a dozen federal agencies. Junemann commutes weekly to Washington from Milwaukee, where his union member wife is a public school employee.

Like many political observers, Junemann can point to the tremendous funding advantage Walker had over Barrett, but the union leader isn’t satisfied with that as an excuse for the mayor’s defeat.

“The people of Wisconsin said that the attack by Scott Walker and his allies on public employes and their unions was acceptable,” Junemann said. “That’s what they said with their votes. This puts us in a very uphill battle for November.”

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has a different spin: “I do not believe the results of the Wisconsin election demonstrate strong support for anti-employee policies.” Instead, “the broader long-term message,” she said, is “working men and women, and their unions, will not stand idly by while reactionary forces attempt to roll back hard-won rights.”

They might not stand idly by, but they also might lose.

The State roundly rejects Kara for the Senate

19 Replies

Yes, the endorsement of Ronnie Cromer today in The State discussed him and the other two people challenging him as well, but I take interest in what was said about Kara Gormley Meador in particular because I’ve written about her here.

Here’s what the editors said:

Kara Gormley Meador promises to shake up the status quo without the anger that often accompanies such pledges. Yet despite the fact that our state has some of the lowest taxes in the nation and our Legislature has a fixation on tax cuts, “tax reform” in her mind must include cutting taxes. Even after years of budget cuts, she’s convinced we need spending caps. And while she makes a point of saying she wants to strengthen the public schools, every time we asked her for specifics, she turned the conversation back to home schooling and private schools, and the need to excuse parents from paying their taxes if they take their kids out of public schools.

Dang, I really can’t argue with any of that. Right down the line, she advocates some really ill-considered ideas. And I was sort of vaguely aware of that when I wrote about her.

But it’s interesting to me to be reminded how differently I would have seen her if I had been talking with her for the purpose of deciding whether to endorse her — and the words in that editorial seem consistent with what I would have concluded, given the same evidence. But since I hadn’t been trying to judge Kara — since I was writing about her within the context of it just being interesting that this local personality had tried to vote in one district, then had to run in another — the picture didn’t gel in my mind. I even encouraged her to run.

Not that I was blind to her faults. Here’s part of what I wrote before:

Those of you who know me can see some significant disconnects with my own positions on issues. For instance, as an ardent believer in representative democracy, I would neither unduly limit the voters’ ability to elect whom they like (term limits) nor use a mathematical formula to supersede the representative’s powers to write a budget (“cap government growth”).

Further, I see inconsistencies in her vision. Today, she indicated that she believed enough waste could be found in state spending to both fully fund the essential functions of state government (which she correctly describes as currently underfunded) and return enough money to taxpayers to stimulate our economy.

In a state as tax-averse as this one, there’s just not enough money there to have your cake and eat it, too, barring a loaves-and-fishes miracle. (OK, enough with the clashing metaphors.)

But she’s smart, she’s energetic, and she seems to have no axes to grind. I think she’d quickly see that you can’t do it all, and make realistic assessments of what can and should be done. Her disgust with the pointless conflicts of modern politics, and the way they militate against a better future for South Carolina’s people.

Ohmygosh, do you see what I just said? “I think she’d quickly see that you can’t do it all, and make realistic assessments of what can and should be done.” And then later, I wrote, “My impression is that Kara has the character to be a positive force in politics, whatever her current notions of specific policy proposals.” Wow. Those are the same excuses I used to make about a certain other attractive young woman with a lot of energy and a nice smile. You know, the one who never really learned much of anything, and takes pride in the unchanging nature of her mind. The one who is now our governor, if you need me to get specific.

Once again, I’m reminded of the value of the endorsement process, properly done (and my regret that newspapers do so few of them now). Its value to the journalist, and to the reader. In that process, you get past vague impressions and force yourself to ask the questions that help you evaluate your initial impressions more systematically. Which The State did today.

I still like Kara personally, but that has little to do with whether she’d be a better senator than Ronnie Cromer.

Inglis on why the tribe turned against him

19 Replies

Kathryn brings my attention to this interview piece with Bob Inglis on Salon.

Bob Inglis is a guy for whom I’ve always had a lot of respect — ever since he got elected to Congress in the early 90s as a fiscal (and cultural) conservative, and then voted against highway money for his own district. This was back when nobody did this. “Conservatives” like Strom Thurmond had always talked a good game, but brought home the bacon. Inglis was a trailblazer.

To listen to Bob Inglis talk is to respect him, just as he respects others — something that sets him apart.

Inglis has always been deeply conservative, and deeply committed to his principles. But the know-nothings of his party unceremoniously dumped him in the last election, basically — as near as I can tell — for not being as angry as they were.

Anyway, this is an interesting passage:

Inglis remembers campaigning door-to-door and encountering hostility for the first time.

“I’m wondering, ‘Why is this happening?’” he said. “And what I came around to is that what happens is the tribe selects you to go to Washington. You believe with the tribe, you agree with them, and you go to Washington as their representative.

“Then you get there and you mingle with these other tribes, and you come to understand their point of view – not agree with it, but understand it. So when that view is presented, you don’t have the same sort of shocked reaction that some of the tribe members at home have to hearing that view.”

He recalled getting to know John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Democratic congressman from Georgia.

“He is an incredible American,” Inglis said. “I just disagree with him on this budget thing. But back at the tribe, at the tribal meeting, it’s like, ‘He’s some kind of Communist, that John Lewis. He’s not an American.’ No! He’s an incredible American. He’s one of our heroes.

“But the tribe doesn’t see that. The tribe sees you as sort of getting too cozy with John. And then they start to doubt you, because of this betrayal response. We are hard-wired to respond very violently – as I understand it, the brain really responds to betrayal. It’s one of the strongest human emotions.”…

Inglis, a conservative Republican to his core, speaks here to a very UnParty sensibility. You have your principles and you stand up for them. But that doesn’t mean you delegitimize those with whom you disagree. If you do that, the deliberative process upon which our system of government is built collapses.

Bob understands that. Too few who still hold office do.

Hoping Obama won’t really run this way

12 Replies

Maybe y’all have time to read this piece by John Heilemann in New York Magazine. I don’t, not today. If you do, please get back and tell me that things don’t really look as dark as they do at the beginning:

The contours of that contest are now plain to see—indeed, they have been for some time. Back in November, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, two fellows at the Center for American Progress, identified the prevailing dynamics: The presidential race would boil down to “demographics versus economics.” That the latter favor Mitt Romney is incontestable. From high unemployment and stagnant incomes to tepid GDP growth and a still-pervasive sense of anxiety bordering on pessimism in the body politic, every salient variable undermines the prospects of the incumbent. The subject line of an e-mail from the Romney press shop that hit my in-box last week summed up the challenger’s framing of the election concisely and precisely: “What’s This Campaign Going to Be About? The Obama Economy.”

The president begs to differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come…

Y’all know how I feel about Identity Politics. I want leaders who want to lead all of us, not this or that arbitrarily selected subset. Obama, to me, is the guy who inspired a victorious crowd in Columbia to chant, on the night of the 2008 South Carolina primary, “Race doesn’t matter!” Amen, said I. The atmosphere that night — when voters rejected the continued partisan strife that the Clinton campaign seemed to offer — was one in which we put our divisions behind us, and work toward building a better country together, as one people.

And if there’s anything more distressing in my book than Identity Politics, it’s Kulturkampf. Those couple of paragraphs are enough to push me toward political despair on that count. The next two grafs are worse:

But if the Obama 2012 strategy in this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will represent a striking deviation. Though the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This [f*@#ing] guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”

Yeah, that’s all we need. A campaign that sees itself as an army of indignant minorities, feminists, gays and young people up against a coalition of self-interested white males, Ayn Randers, birthers and nativists, with both sides convinced that it is at war with the other. And each subset being motivated not by what’s good for the country, but by what it sees as advantageous to itself as a group.

So much for the United States.

All that’s left to me at this point is to hope the campaign plays out differently from the way this writer envisions it.

Wesley gets on Joan’s case

16 Replies

In a release today, Dick Harpootlian invited me “to watch the Republican Senate Caucus Director bash Brady.”

That would be Wesley Donehue. If you’ll recall, Wesley got himself in hot water with Nikki Haley back in 2010. Now he’s going after Joan?

He and “Pub Politics” cohort Phil Bailey just keep on getting themselves in trouble. Yes, life can get confusing when you work for them on the one hand, and play the political pundit on the other.

Or do they — get into trouble, I mean? Does Joan Brady have problems within her party, problems that make it OK for a Republican operative to say things like this? She has called attention to herself on the Haley ethics thing, and you can find Republicans at every point along the spectrum of possible opinions about that…

Dick, of course, is trying to embarrass Joan on Beth Bernstein‘s behalf. That’s going to be a general election contest to watch.

Nikki to Mitt: Think “Indian-American.” Then think, “minority female.” Got that?

25 Replies

Did y’all see this story yesterday?

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may not yet know who will be his vice presidential pick, but S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley has some ideas for him.

“There are amazing candidates for VP and (I) believe whoever Gov. Romney chooses will be part of a dream team. My preference would be Bobby Jindal or Condi Rice,” Haley wrote Wednesday when asked her vice presidential favorites during a Facebook chat with South Carolinians.

I didn’t know Nikki was the subliminal-message type. I thought she was more direct than that.

It’s like she’s swinging a pocket watch in front of him, and saying Miiiiiitt… Miiiiitt… You’re getting sleepy… What do you want in a running mate?… You want an Indian-American… like Bobby Jindal… and you want a female minority… like Condi Rice… oh, nooooo… you can only pick onnnnne… how are you going to get everything you want in one personnnnnn?…

And that would make it less “political” HOW?

12 Replies

I was a bit surprised by this move by Joan Brady:

A Midlands lawmaker says the investigation into Gov. Nikki Haley has gotten too political and is encouraging it be investigated by the state Attorney General’s Office instead of a legislative committee.

“The State Attorney General’s Office has the experienced investigators and staff necessary to address this matter in a fair and timely manner,” wrote Rep. Joan Brady, R-Richland, a member of the House Ethics Committee that is looking into charges that Haley illegally lobbied while a member of the House.

In a letter to the committee’s chairman, Brady continued the committee is “not positioned to hire the criminal investigators and lawyers necessary to fully investigate this complaint.”…

On the one hand, the attorney general should be someone who could credibly do this. That is the one great advantage, theoretically, to having the A.G. elected separately from the governor.

On the other hand, what’s our experience been? The A.G.’s office was much criticized for supposedly dragging its feet on the Ken Ard investigation. I’m not saying Alan Wilson DID delay dealing with that sticky wicket; I’m saying he was accused of it. And I think it fair to say that criticism was… political. In the end, the thing was handled properly, but along the way there were plenty of recriminations. Political recriminations.

Does an investigation by lawmakers of one of their own have a political dimension? You bet. But so does an investigation by an elected official from outside the General Assembly.

And as it happens, the way the law is set up, it’s the Legislature’s job to investigate this. Rep. Brady not wanting to do so comes across as little more than wanting to ditch a hot potato.

Maybe it is more than that. If so, Rep. Brady should present clear evidence that the process has been compromised. That is to say, more compromised than that party-line vote to dismiss the charges the first time around.

The innuendo here — raised by Nikki Haley (who would never seek to influence an investigation of herself — would she?) — is that Bobby Harrell has improperly influenced the investigation by urging the panel to DO something this time.

I suppose you could see that two ways — as Harrell out to get Nikki, or as the speaker wanting a trustworthy ethics panel that won’t punt at the first whiff of public scrutiny.

If Rep. Brady has evidence that Harrell has crossed a line, let’s hear it when the panel meets on Wednesday. If not, if it’s just that the members are in an uncomfortable position here — well, Alan Wilson would be, too, if you dumped it on him.

Gallup: Veterans are cause of the gender gap

18 Replies

Here’s an interesting fact I didn’t know before.

Turns out that the “gender gap” that has Mitt Romney doing better among men and Barack Obama doing better among women (the usual pattern for a generation, at least) is less a gender thing, and more a matter of whether men have served in the military or not. According to Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ — U.S. veterans, about 13% of the adult population and consisting mostly of older men, support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama for president by 58% to 34%, while nonveterans give Obama a four-percentage-point edge.

These data, from an analysis of Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted April 11-May 24, show that 24% of all adult men are veterans, compared with 2% of adult women.

Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points. It turns out that the male skew for Romney is driven almost entirely by veterans. Romney leads by one point among nonveteran men, contrasted with the 28-point edge Romney receives among male veterans.

The small percentage of female veterans in the U.S., in contrast to their male counterparts, do not differ significantly in their presidential vote choice from the vast majority of women who are not veterans…

Here’s a graph:

Interesting. I wonder what the long-term implications of this will be. Most of the men who have served in the military are older than I am. Twenty years from now, will much of the gender gap have disappeared, in favor of Democrats? I don’t know. I’d need to understand better why this veteran gap exists to be able to answer that.

The duel that wasn’t (so far as we know)

6 Replies

It looked like the sort of facetious thing that people say on Twitter and which are quickly forgotten. Yet Katrina Shealy seems to be pinning her hopes for unseating Jake Knotts on the substance of Tweet sent in 2010.

The Tweet in question is reproduced above.

Perhaps there’s more to it, but one couldn’t find it in either the story in The State this morning, or the post by Will Folks that apparently prompted it. (The story in The State seemed to be of that new variety we’re becoming accustomed to — one that the MSM would never have reported in the past without having nailed down all the facts first, but publishes now so as not to appear out of the loop. Neither Jake nor Ms. Shealy was reached before publishing the story, which speaks of a sense of hurry.)

Here are some of the questions that the story raises in my mind:

  • Did Knotts ever say anything to Haddon?
  • Did he actually challenge him to a duel? (Duels, of course, properly constituted, require that both parties be gentlemen. I don’t know Haddon, but Jake has never seemed the dueling sort to me. He’s more of the pick-you-up-and-throw-you-across-the-room kind of guy. Ask Dick Harpootlian.)
  • Is that Tweet Mr. Haddon’s response to the challenge? If so, it is both unclear, and doesn’t seem to follow the accepted forms. It takes more the form of barroom bluster than a formal reply. Perhaps if he would identify his seconds, we could ask them.
  • Has either Mr. Knotts or Mr. Haddon been “out” before (which in the age of dueling meant something different from what it means today)? Who would have the upper hand?
  • If there’s any substance to this, will Jake be barred in the future from conducting classes for those who wish to carry concealed weapons? He has taught such classes in the past. One hopes those classes have not involved standing back-to-back, or pacing off distances.
  • Does Ms. Shealy in any way have standing to be taking legal action in this matter? She thinks she does, because her aim is to bar Sen. Knotts from office. But how does that give her any more standing than any other constituent? It seems that only parties to the alleged duel would have standing. And of course, the Code would (I assume) bar a challenged gentleman from resorting to the courts in order to avoid the Field of Honor.

I, along with you, await answers to all of the above.

Obama sucks! So send me more money!

6 Replies

Catching up with my email, I’m marveling over this one from Joe Wilson, which takes irrelevant misdirection to a new level. Yes, we know that Nikki Haley got elected governor running against President Obama rather than her actual opponent, but I don’t think anyone has to date produced such a whiplash-inducing change of subject from “Obama sucks!” to “Send me money!” as this one:

Dear Friends,

41% of West Virginia’s Democrats believe that a federal prisoner would make a better president than Barack Obama.

Keith Judd received 69,766 votes Tuesday night in West Virginia’s primary while still serving a 17-year sentence for extortion. Shouldn’t this send a clear message to President Obama that he’s failing the American people?

The President promised to help our economy, but he will not listen to any of the pro-business, pro-competition, pro-free market principles that conservatives have offered.

The President promised to bring change to our country, but his version of change has resulted in restrictions on our American liberties and further partisan divide.

The President promised a lot of things, but he’s been unable to provide the leadership needed.

Americans are tired of the president’s policies. So much that voters say even a jailbird knows more about freedom than Barack Obama.

The choice is clear. In order to get our economy back on track and maintain  liberty, we must elect a new president in November.

We must also elect conservative leaders who are willing to stand up for the truth to President Obama or anyone else in office. I will always work to bring economic policies that produce jobs and protect liberties for the people of South Carolina’s Second District.  Will you join with me and donate to the campaign today?

Sincerely,

Joe

P.S. If you agree that we need to elect a new president this November, please visit Facebook and Twitter to let me know.

When Romney was a bully (or so they say)

33 Replies

A couple of readers have brought this up, from different ends of the political spectrum. And I suppose I’ll go ahead and post it for y’all to discuss, even though I hardly know what to say about it myself:

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”…

For my part, I don’t look at the Mitt Romney of today and see a guy who would do something like this. And one hates to hold youthful errors against anyone forever. If Romney was ever like this, then I’m pretty sure he’s not that way now.

But… while I, too, have matured (a bit) over the years, and I might have done some crazy things in my youth… I can’t imagine a time, ever, that I would have done something like this. It just never was in me to do something like this to another person. Of course, maybe if I’d been sent off to boarding school and had to define my place in a Lord-of-the-Flies kind of pecking order, maybe I’d have been a different sort of person.

But this gives me pause, if this is true. Because however much a person matures, he’s still the individual who did this.

I don’t know. I doubt I’d make my decision whether to vote for someone based on this.

But what do y’all think? That’s my purpose in raising this.

Apparently, it’s all over for Eric Holder

2 Replies

Well, it’s all over for Eric Holder. Chad Prosser, who is running for Congress in the new 7th District, put out this release yesterday:

CONSERVATIVE REFORMER CHAD PROSSER CALLS FOR ERIC HOLDER TO RESIGN

Former Sanford Cabinet Member points to interference in SC internal affairs and mishandling of Fast and Furious scandal as reasons for Holder’s immediate resignation

(MURRELLS INLET, SC) – In the wake of Attorney General Eric Holder’s failure to intervene in the Fast and Furious “Gunwalking” Operation, unprecedented intrusion into the internal affairs of South Carolina, his perjury before Congress and his intentional obstruction of a Congressional investigation into who is at fault for the death of U.S. Border Control Agent Brian Terry, Chad Prosser is calling for United States Attorney General Eric Holder to vacate his office immediately.

“Holder’s role in blocking the efforts of South Carolina to crack down on illegal immigration and protect the integrity of elections in our state are reason enough for him to resign. Adding perjury, obstruction of justice, and an impending citation for contempt to the case against Holder should be enough for President Obama to ask Eric Holder to leave his cabinet post immediately,” said Prosser.

When Holder was forced to appear before Congress to testify regarding Fast and Furious on May 3, 2011, he told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he first heard about the operation “over the last few weeks”. Shortly after his testimony, a briefing memo dated July 5, 2010 and addressed to Eric Holder was uncovered which outlined Fast and Furious and contradicted his sworn statement to Congress. Since that time, the Justice Department has repeatedly denied the media and Congress access to documents surrounding the scandal.

Now, congressional leaders are set to pursue a contempt citation against Holder to force him to comply with multiple requests for government records outlining the failed operation.

“We need an Attorney General committed to upholding and enforcing the law, not one who makes his own set of rules and breaks the law,” added Prosser. “Eric Holder needs to resign immediately and our nation is in desperate need of a president who appoints competent leaders who understand, respect and abide by the law.”

… More information on Chad and his campaign for conservative reform in Washington can be found at www.chadprosser.com.

###

Sure, Mr. Holder may work for the president of the United States, and not for Chad Prosser, and not have a clue who Chad Prosser is, but of course he has no choice but to resign now, right? I just don’t see how he can withstand this withering pressure. I mean, Chad has demanded that he quit. And he is a “conservative reformer.” Just ask him; he’ll tell you.

OK, back to being semi-serious…

What did Mr. Prosser hope to achieve with this out-of-left-field release about something that was in national, not SC, news a year ago? Apparently, the message is “Trust me to attack anyone in the Obama administration, regardless of whether it has anything to do with me or any of the issues in my district.” Because, you see, that’s what the GOP electorate wants.

Is he right to assume that? Is it that bad?

Obama definitely deserves bin Laden credit

95 Replies

President Barack Obama makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1, 2011. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

OK, my Corleone metaphor aside, let’s address the actual political question before us: Does Barack Obama deserve any particular credit for “getting” Osama bin Laden, or would “anyone have done what he did?”

This is actually a very important question. When deciding who should be one’s president going forward, there is no more important question than whether he would be an effective commander in chief (or in the case of the incumbent, whether he is an effective commander in chief).

Republicans, including some who should know better, are essentially saying Obama did nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. They are wrong. I initially thought as they did — not that I wanted to take anything away from the president, but because I thought it was true — but as I read and learned more about the decision-making process leading  to the raid on Abbottabad, I changed my mind.

Last night, I inadvertently saw a few seconds of TV “news.” John McCain was saying that of course Mitt Romney would have done the same thing, or something along those lines.

For his part, outrageously, Mitt Romney has said that “even Jimmy Carter” would have ordered the SEALs into the bin Laden compound. I’m going to pause and count to 10 before proceeding after this latest reflexive GOP expression of contempt toward my man Jimmy. (And while I’m counting, I’ll just share with you this HuffPost headline, “Jimmy Carter, Seven Years as Navy Officer; Mitt Romney, 0 Years in Military, 0 Years Foreign Policy Experience.” Effin’ A.)

Well, as it happens, we have strong reason to believe that Jimmy Carter would have ordered such an operation. He actually did order a roughly comparable one. It failed, as military operations sometimes do. (The one Obama ordered could have failed, too, at a number of critical points. That’s one reason he deserves credit for having the guts to give the order.) But he ordered it. It was a big deal that he ordered it. His secretary of state resigned over it.

But would “anyone else” have done the same? There is little reason to think so. It would have been Bill Clinton’s M.O., for instance, to have flipped a couple of cruise missiles in that direction. And as we saw in Kosovo, he had a predilection for air power rather than boots on the ground. But… and this is a huge “but”… is it fair to make the assumption that the real-life Bill Clinton of the 1990s would have been as reticent, as cautious, post-9/11? It’s impossible to say.

What we do know is that in real life, there was sharp disagreement and debate in the Obama administration over how to proceed — whether to believe the assumptions based on incomplete intelligence (for doing that, George W. Bush earned the never-ending “Bush lied” canard), whether to act on them at all, whether to send in troops at all or simply bomb the compound, whether to send a joint force or a coherent Navy team, whether to notify the Pakistanis or just go in, whether to try to capture bin Laden or go in intending to kill him, whether to bring back his body or send it to sleep with the fishes.

And when I say debate within the administration, I don’t mean between what the Republicans would characterized as the Democratic sissy politicos, but among the professionals — the generals and admirals and Sec. Gates.

And at critical stages, the president and the president alone seems to have made very tough calls. And the right ones. Most importantly, he decided to send in men rather than just bombs. That way, he could make sure, he could minimize collateral damage — and the U.S. could reap an intelligence bonanza.

That took nerves not everyone would have. So many things could have gone wrong doing it this way — and nearly did. In what had to feel like a replay of Jimmy Carter’s debacle, we lost a helicopter. But having learned that lesson, we had backups.

Some Republicans would have you believe that giving Obama credit would take away somehow from the superb, almost superhuman job that the SEALs and the rest of the military and CIA team did. Nothing could be further from the truth. It stands as one of the most amazing coup de main operations of the past century. They performed as brilliantly as the Israelis did at Entebbe, for instance. But they had their roles to play, and the commander in chief had his. And all involved did their jobs remarkably well.

I refer you to two posts I wrote last year, as I came to the conclusion that Barack Obama personally deserved credit for the leadership calls that led to our killing bin Laden. Here they are:

In invite you to go back and read them, to see how I reached a conclusion very different from the line we’re hearing from Republicans now.

There is no way of knowing whether Mitt Romney would have made the same calls. I suspect that he might have erred on the side of caution, but I could be completely wrong about that. He might have acted in exactly the same manner. But what I know is that Barack Obama did — and that what he did is not just “what anyone would have done.”

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)