An entire suite of exciting new tools have become available to Republicans, and if deployed, will mean a much wider margin of victory in 2012 than we would otherwise see – indeed, these tools may be critical for victory in 2012 at all.

Article I in this series will discuss the major release of rVotes.com.  Article II will tell you about Nationbuilder.com, and article III will discuss PrecinctProject.us.

Background
Almost everyone recalls the massive web site/campaign management tool, Obama for America (OFA), that was a major factor in Obama’s 2008 victory.  The day after election day, the site was renamed Organizing for America (OFA).  Today, both domain names redirect you to barackobama.com, the president’s current 2012 campaign site.  Note that during the interim since Obama’s election, OFA (as Organizing for America), has continued to build on the historically strong online activist presence that we witnessed in 2007/2008.

Although the system is pervasive and massive, and performs many, many campaign functions required for victory, what drew public attention at first was the web site’s ability to quickly draw in hordes of activist volunteers (some 400,000) via the web, engage them online, and immediately make them productive online in promoting a campaign victory.

Both LadyImpactOhio (here and here as well) and I took a look at the system before and after the campaign.  While LIO’s research was much more thorough than mine,  my own research was conducted prior to the election as I succeeded in contributing a small amount to the Obama campaign with a credit card (and a foreign billing address) to confirm the campaign was purposely engaged in the criminal activity of accepting foreign contributions.  LIO’s vigorous research was much more comprehensive.

The system, built up over nearly a decade from it’s precursors known variously as Catalist, Voter Activiation Network (VAN) and VoteBuilder, became OFA.

OFA was not just used to elect candidates, it was used extensively to organize and mobilize support for passage of Obamacare and other measures.

One of the key strengths of OFA is it’s ability to share data among many activist organizations such as the campaigns, ACORN, SEIU, Planned Parenthood, etc.

The Republicans correctly perceived it as a real threat.  It was.

Predictably, the RNC, once so seriously threatened by this array of tools, wants to put it’s head in the sand when offered the very same tool today: rVotes.  That’s a story for another series of articles.  No matter, the state GOPs and Tea Parties will be deploying this system as soon that they can wrap their minds around it and evaluate it, and that’s a major task in and of itself.

As we’ve examined rVotes carefully around the backwaters of the internet for the past few weeks, I’ve gotten in the habit of telling newcomers to the topic that it will take you over a week of casual reading to wrap your mind around everything that rVotes can do for a political effort and its allies.  That’s no exaggeration.

rVotes is already deployed in Rhode Island, and GOP state chair Ken McKay is reportedly ecstatic with it, as it has  already won the RI GOP one election they thought was unlikely.  I’ve heard of moves afoot to get rVotes implemented in AZ, CA, MI and MN.  Other states will soon follow.

Emerging as rVotes.com
rVotes and even its precursor, VAN are products of capitalism.   The software was written by venturesome capitalist programmers with the intent of future profit.   (I hope this is encouraging news to you, Dear Reader, as this is a conservative web site.)    The Democrats paid up first.   When Steve Adler, the original VAN programmer decided to leave VAN in 2005, in order to get other elements of the settlement he wanted (such as taking his source code with him) he had to agree to a 5 year non-compete clause.

He has now emerged from that non-compete provision, and is making his software (with 5 years of improvements) available to Republicans.

The weeks of investigation a large group has already performed in the backwaters of the internet leads me to anticipate a few possible early responses.  Before you respond with suspicious comments about top-down systems that ignore the grassroots from profiteering publishers, please take a careful look at rVotes licensing arrangements (I won’t go into them here).  As I noted above, many of us have been investigating and researching rVotes for weeks now – conference calls, news lists, etc., and have concluded that rVotes deserves a serious hearing from party, civic and Tea Party/912 leaders.

If you are suspicious of the rVotes principals intentions or motives, then I suspect in turn that no words of mine here could allay your suspicions.  Perform your own investigations and satisfy yourself one way or the other.

Yes, rVotes will seem expensive to early adopters.  The prospect of access to rVotes will also energize the grassroots to go out and simply raise that money now, so the real question becomes one of foregoing victory next year in your area while you wait for the investment price to come down.  Since grassroots Republicans can be formidable fundraisers, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to consider foregoing the victories that would otherwise accrue to local parties and Tea Parties.  After all, it’s only money, as Rebublicans are sometimes heard to say.

And the creators of a system this worthwhile in its support for our victories deserve to prosper.

Remember, the Democrats have been clobbering us with this system for 4-6 years.  That’s a very good track record.

This article does not say much about what rVotes actually does.   As I allude above, understanding rVotes is not a quick study.  Follow the links above to explore.  Do it when you have plenty of time.

Finally, as the creator of PROCINCT, I anticipate that others might ask or wonder,  ”why would you endorse a system or product that many would regard as a competitor to yours?”  Passage of time will prove that there will still be a place for PROCINCT.   So my reply would be simple and short:

For our efforts, for our way of thought, for our way of life, it’s about victory.

Ron Robinson is founder and creator of PROCINCT, is a GOP official/activist in Los Angeles county, a new media & activist blogger and a businessman.

Crossposted

You just know there have to be some ‘unkind’ minds snickering away in Europe, Turtle Bay, and the Caliphate souks of the middle east.  Snickering about how easily Obama was manipulated into a rash action in Libya.  Combine that with how Obama is deliberately staging the US’s fade from leadership of the operation and you have a picture that should make any middle east dictator split his sides guffawing.  I imagine many emails to/from the policy wonks in the above-named locations contain a lot of smiley-faces this week.  You know, the ones with winks.  = ; – )

Obama jumped through all the hoops of fire required to get UN and Arab League approval, but omitted keeping Congress in the loop.  Smart power.

All the constitutionally mandated bases were tagged and touched.

Oh wait….

I don’t really imagine that Yogi Bera ever actually said it, but if asked, he would have said something like, “You can only hit the ball that you have your eye on.”  Obama obviously had his eye on the UN and Arab League balls.  He drove those out of the park.  Ooohrah.     He also just as obviously did not have his eye on the constitutionally-mandated Congressional ball.  He didn’t even swing at that one.  Still a strike, though.

It’s really hard to believe that Defense, State, and the NSC had all their various meetings in the run-up to Libya and nobody said, “Hey, we have to inform Congress.”  OK, let’s postulate that somebody did pipe up in one or more of the meetings (principals absent, of course).  OK, alternatively, let’s postulate that nobody piped up and said it.   Neither picture bodes well for a President who wishes to have a good relationship with Congress, or for the competence of the ‘leaders’ at Defense, State or the NSC.

Obama exhibits an amazing arrogance by working so hard to get UN, NATO, and Arab League signoffs, but totally ignoring the Constitutionally-mandated requirement to secure Congress’ agreement.   His unstinting devotion to the cumbaya One World meme while on vacation working in Brazil is obvious.  But it doesn’t cut much ice with Congress.  Or the people in Paducah.

Now we know Congress is probably being the teeniest bit disingenuous with their squawks late this week, but Congress has been on vacation.   But your money would probably be safe if you were wagering that some WTF (not Win the Future) emails were sent from some Blackberries on some redwood decks when certain members of Congress observed Secretary Clinton and Susan Rice running around Turtle Bay garnering votes for a certain Security Council resolution.

You can place your bets here now that various leaders in the middle east are laying plans now for the next trap they will place for Obama – both to further dissipate American power and cause the administration Yet Another PR/diplomatic/domestic Disaster.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if by a year from now, Obama has started more wars than he inherited.

(points) Look over there! (pushes) Yaaa! Got ya!

I’ll bet every serviceman deployed in the Med feels great that the UN and the Arab League provided multilateral cover for the ops that are keeping them sleep-deprived these days.  Predictably, the Arab League has already reversed course and is criticizing the operations now.   Alas, it looks like the Green Party in Germany is about to form a governing coalition and those are exactly the types who have read our Constitution and fully realize that the fact that Obama did not consult Congress gives them a really good chance of getting a CAG or an air wing commander in front of a tribunal at the Hague.   You can bet that our servicemen in the Med are glad their Commander in Chief gave them full legal cover for the ops they are undertaking.  They read blogs, too.  They think about these things and they notice.

Where are the carriers?

It’s not just military power that is dissipated when the leader of the free world becomes a clueless clown.   It’s our diplomatic power, our credibility, and our ability to defend ourselves from both diplomatic and military attacks.  And yes, prestige.

Of course, already the Defense Department is saying that the Libya operation will take months.  Not ‘days’ like Obama promised.  Of course, Obama knows he doesn’t have to keep that promise, because liberals and the media will give him cover.  It was both highly amusing and very chilling to discover reports of how Hillary swooped in and stepped on Gates on a TV interview, interrupting his response to a question, to go on a minute and a third tirade about how  ”his [Ghadafy's] troops begin to turn back toward the west – and to see the opposition begin to reclaim the ground they had lost.”  Something, by the way, that wasn’t in the UN mandate.

He’s covered himself a bit by moving the Enterprise from the Med to Hormuz.  No “thanks for the great job in the Med, boys,” from Obama.  And certainly no ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner.  But why move the Enterprise out of the Med entirely?   Right about now, it would have been nice to have a carrier right off the border between Lebanon and Israel and have our air wings do some training with the IDF while Israel is deploying  their Iron Dome missile shield.  Some keen minds in Damascus and Amman would be watching very closely, and Lebanon would appreciate it, too.

So now we have two really-crazy CAGs  (Enterprise and Vinson) just outside Hormuz trying to de-conflict air ops while practically in each others’ wakes.  That has to be really crazy-making.

It also suggests that Obama knows or suspects where the next head-fake is coming from.

Some group of petty dictators can play “let’s you and him fight” and Obama will go for it, especially if he has UN or SEATO or somebody’s multilateral blessing and there is no vital US interest involved.  He’d probably even try an end run around Congress again, because this administration has definite learning disabilities.

.
Cross-posted at Unified Patriots to stimulate conservative activism.

John Boehner and Eric Cantor have overlooked an important principle of  ”command”: never issue the order that you know will not be obeyed.

The headline question is not merely rhetorical and I do have an answer for you, because our miraculous system of government (that Churchill called the worst, except for all the others) has always furnished the answer and generations before our own made liberal use of it.

Alas, we’ve been to busy with driving the kids to soccer or whatever mundane tasks occupy our time, and for many of us, our civics education omitted the answer that stood to serve for generations of earlier Americans.

So today, true conservatives (mostly the House freshmen)  find themselves locked in another roundy-round of rebellion against House leadership to try to restore sanity to the budget process.   I’ve heard the speaker’s plan and it’s brilliant.  It also probably won’t work because of the command principle I set forth at the beginning of this article.

And it relies too much on press perceptions that will rarely, if ever, favor House Republicans. This is not the time for “too clever by half” strategies.

I had presumed that Boehner and his staff were awake during the last election, but I may have been wrong.   They apparently missed the fact that they have 73 new freshmen who were elected on the promise of getting the budget under control.   Boehner should understand that these freshmen feel strongly that their promises should be kept and they feel their constituents are watching (they are).

So Boehner and Cantor proceed with the corporate GOP assumption that promises need not be kept and it’s OK to hedge early in the game until all the ducks are lined up and you’re ready to swoop in with a well-prepared vote that will wipe out the opposition.

They are wrong.

So back to my opening question: Who whips the whips?   The answer, of course, the the members of the party’s central committees.  Yes, the precinct committeemen.  Only a member of the central committee can whisper the word “primary” with full authority to a politician and drive an icy spike of fear into that politician’s heart.

Talking heads, bloggers, and speechmakers can all assert the word “primary” – even assert it loudly as they frequently do – and evince hardly a flicker of an eyelash.  I don’t have to elaborate on the  whip factor of a mere eyelash.

But let a few central committee members, a few county chairs, a few state party delegates drop the word “primary” backstage or in a hotel hallway, and a politician is suddenly reassessing his priorities.

So the (easy) trick is to insert those true conservatives into the various party central committees in Ohio CD8 (Boehner) and Virginia CD7 (Cantor) where they can whisper the word “primary” with full authority, full orchestration, and 4-part harmony.

Only members of these party central committees can actually make a primary happen, and the politicians know it.

Luckily, the party has made that very, very easy for us.   While I don’t have the numbers here for Ohio CD8 and Virginia CD7, nationwide, half or more of those governing (voting) central committee seats are vacant.  And many can be filled instantly by an appointment from the county chair.  And the county chairs are proving pretty accommodating (they need volunteers).

Better still, we are finding that when newcomers arrive at the party central committee in most states, they are quickly drafted upward to serve as a delegate to the state committee.  There is currently a power vacuum in the party and those who stand too close get drafted in and up quickly.

party.PROCINCT.net was originally started to supply precinct walk lists for GOTV operations.  But in 2011 with no big elections this year, we decided to help folks get involved in governing their party on their local and state central committees.   No other form of activism will advance our cause more than getting directly involved in the governance of our party.

And it’s turned out to be a place where  PCs gather to trade tips and strategize after they become PCs.

This happens to be the  season when most states are holding their caucuses to select CC members.  Get involved now.  To find out how, follow the link above and navigate to your state.   party.PROCINCT.net has begun a determined drive to focus on Ohio’s CD8 (Butler, Miami, Mercer,Darke, Preble Counties) and Virginia’s CD7 (Henrico, Chesterfield, Rapahannock  Montpelier, Page, Culpeper, Madison, Orange, Spotsylvania, Louisa, Goochland, Hanover, Caroline Counties) and fill all the vacant seats on these various central committees.

A few of those new CC members will probably be very eager to whisper the word “primary’ in some politician’s ear.

 
Cross posted for better party governance

(This is a current report from the senate offices in the WI capitol.  The author needed an assist that I was happy to provide.  Cross-posted here with permission from Dan Collins’  excellent POWIP blog. By a separate report, Dem legislators are apparently hiding out in a motel in Rockford, IL beyond the jurisdiction of WI State Troopers who would fetch them back to vote.  Update: Dems found.  Scroll to bottom for flash rally in Rockford, IL. UPDATE II:  Dems depart resort after discovery, video ambush linked from David Hale, RTP Coordinator.) Now embedded below.

Take a good hard look at the pictures above and below. Every one of them contains young children or adolescents wrongly recruited to carry the water of public employee unions here in the great state of Wisconsin. Looking at the above pre-printed signs, one might ask: “Stop the attack on Wisconsin families?  How about stopping the attack on Wisconsin taxpayers?”

Anyone watching the national news already knows that an ugly fight has unfolded in my home state between the public employee unions and the Republican governor and legislators elected in surprising numbers last November. I will leave the details to other sources since they are readily available. The long and short of it is, Wisconsin is dead broke, and Governor Scott Walker is looking to put an end to the gross fiscal mismanagement that got us to this bad, bad place.  One of the ways he aims to do that is to ask the state’s public employees to start chipping in toward their benefits. They currently pay not one thin dime toward their pensions (for which there is zero vesting period) and a teeny, tiny little contribution toward their healthcare coverage. This would be bumped up to a 5.8 percent pension contribution (in line with the national average) and a 12 percent healthcare contribution (half the average paid by a private sector worker).

If you think the unions are unhappy about that, you should hear them on the following provisions:

Collective bargaining – The bill would make various changes to limit collective bargaining for most public employees to wages.  Total wage increases could not exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum.  Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the new contract is settled.  Collective bargaining units are required to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union.  Employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues.  These changes take effect upon the expiration of existing contracts.  Local law enforcement and fire employees, and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from these changes.

Let’s be clear about what Governor Walker accomplishes via this bill, should it pass (and as of a couple of hours ago, the Joint Finance Committee had finally voted and moved the bill on to the full legislature):

• Cut Wisconsin’s $136.7 million deficit for FY 2010-2011
• Save state employee jobs in order to keep people off unemployment in a challenging job market
• Keep total employee contributions far below what anyone in the private sector would pay
• Aim toward Right to Work instead of outright decertification of unions

Considering the level of fiscal and economic challenge Wisconsin now faces, you’d think union members might feel a bit grateful not to have to make far greater sacrifices…or lose their jobs altogether. Instead, they’ve gone completely bat$#!%. And they’ve dragged children of every age into their extended temper tantrum as they try to bully Republican legislators into giving in to the status quo Wisconsin can no longer afford. The don’t seem to have any conception at all that Wisconsin swung from its typical purply-blue to a rosy shade of red last November.

I’ve made visits to the State Capitol Building for two days in a row now. On both days, hoards of children, from toddlers all the way up to high-schoolers, were present…many holding signs, others singing or chanting, some marching, a few running through the corridors shrieking…ALL unwittingly helping to propagate union lies about the bill and anger toward legislators standing for fiscal sanity and limited government. Like these girls for example who seemed so happy to be holding these signs:

Most of these kids were of school age.  On a weekday, that’s exactly where they should have been.  In school.  Instead, they were being used by adults, many of them teachers who apparently have zero conscience but had the chutzpah to carry signs like the one below, saying, “Care about educators like they care about your child.” Respectfully, if pimping children out to be used as the pawns of the unions is how teachers in this state “take care” of them, I wouldn’t wish that sort of succor on anyone.

It hasn’t stopped there, either. Wednesday, there was a massive “sick out” so that teachers could show up at the Capitol, many of them bringing students with them who should have been learning how to do an algebraic equation or diagram a sentence or memorize the Pre-Amble to the Constitution (I know, I know, I’m dreaming on that Constitution one). Instead, they all took a field trip to learn firsthand what recently-unelected Governor Jim Doyle last year so egregiously added to the state’s public school curriculum: The History of Collective Bargaining, aka Traditional Methods of  Bullying the Guy that Signs Your Checks.

And that is exactly what makes me so furious about the use of children to further union ends. Teachers, in particular, are grossly abusing a massive power differential and an inherent trust in their relationship with students to further their own ends. They are telling lies in order to get these students to sing and dance to their tune.

They’ve told kids that programs they love at school will be cut. (No school cuts are on the table in this bill).

They’ve told students that pension funds would be taken away from teachers who’d saved their whole lives. (There are zero retroactive cuts in the bill, particularly any that would violate the state’s fiduciary responsibilities).

They’ve screamed the message to children that collective bargaining rights are being taken away. (Unions will simply have to take a vote every year to re-certify and allow individuals to choose whether they want to be represented by the union or not.)

All of this falsehood being pumped to impressionable minds who have no reason to doubt the people they so easily look up to as role models.  And for what?  Because teachers, along with other public employee unions don’t want to contribute to fixing a massive fiscal problem that financing their benefits over the years has helped to create. There is no, “Kids, we’ve had it golden for a long time, but there comes a day when you have to take responsibility.” Now THAT is what I would call honorable teaching: Giving kids a view of how things work in the real world. Showing them how to accept difficulties in life and move forward in spite of them. Giving them a true sense of even the crappy, devalued dollar we now have.

Instead, they’re dragging kids as pawns into a labor protest, teaching them to feel entitled, showing them how to throw a massive and ugly public temper tantrum if you’re not getting what you want, and modeling how to intimidate people who won’t cede the road entire to you. Nice…

For the past two nights, students in Baraboo were up marching around the town square in protest of teachers losing pay and collective bargaining rights.  Yesterday afternoon, there was a student/teacher walkout in that same town. As of this morning, a huge rash of school districts all over the state—Platteville, Racine, Madison, De Forest, Edgerton, Lodi, Waunakee, you name it—are closed as a result of high teacher absences and an inability to cover them with enough substitutes. You can bet, students will once again be a prominent percentage of the crowd again this morning, with the vote being taken around 11am.

I shudder to think that kids may have been in the mobs that showed up at the homes of Republican legislators who were being picketed over the past few days. I don’t know if there were children there or not, because I wasn’t there, but based on what I’m seeing everywhere else, and the ways children are being used to do the union’s heavy lifting, I frankly wouldn’t be at all surprised. Abysmal…

But it’s “all about the kids,” right…?  That’s what the teachers keep disingenuously telling us, anyway.

Teachers and other public-employee union members and leaders ought to be heartily ashamed of themselves for way they are lying to and using these children, who are not getting an honest picture of this situation.  Nor are they getting the education they deserve…the education that will serve them out in the real world. That bringing this fight first into the classroom, and then taking the classroom out into the street, is not at present a fireable offense…?  Well, it damned well oughta be.

And that is all I have to say about that. Back to the Capitol I go for what ought to be another very dismal day in education in Wisconsin.

For more than a day now, Drudge’s main headline has been substantially the same as the headline on this story.

Let me tell you what that really means.

If the government took 100% of all our paychecks and pensions for the full year, that would not make an appreciable dent in our national debt.

If the government took 100% of our paychecks and pensions for the full year and 100% of corporate revenues (not income or profit, but revenues) for the entire year, that might be a fair percentage, but still not that close to all of the sum.

But that would still leave untouched obligations like future social payments (for which we have no revenues, because we are going further in debt every year and paying more and more interest), and Fannie/Freddie bailouts, federal pensions, and possible bailouts of local and state pensions.

The debt that we are paying interest on now is equal to the entire economic output of our country for one full year.   That includes all interest or earnings paid on mutual and hedge funds, derivatives and swaps nationwide for a full year.  All freight charged in the US.  All our exports.  All the money that pays for all our imports.  Any. Economic.  Activity.  For one year, our debt equals.  We have not plumbed the depths of our drunkenness with the national credit card.

That’s just to deliver government for the past 5 years since the debt really mushroomed, mostly in the past 3 years.  Not much for the sum we are paying.  Just government, with some social benefits and a lot of bailouts.

Nothing in the debt secures us an asset that we can redeem for cash – as you might if you got upside down on your house – you still have the underlying value of the house to redeem a significant portion of that debt, even if you have to default or go bankrupt.

Not so with our national debt.

It’s a cash debt that must be redeemed in full in cash, with no asset(s) to sell to pay part of it; and interest must be paid in the meantime.

Remember when governments ran surpluses?   And had a little (or a lot) of extra cash around from year to year to meet emergencies like, say, Katrina?

Folks, we are really out of money.  The $100 billion in cuts being discussed this week are not even 10% of this single year’s deficit alone.  We should cut $1.6 trillion from the budget this year — right now.  And cut $1.6 trillion consistently from the automatic programmed budget increases for the next 10 years.  Otherwise, we are just going deeper into debt at the same rate as the last 3 years.

We are going to see a crash much, much harder than that of the 30s.  Food and fuel prices are already skyrocketing as Obama promised.  The bottom will be very, very hard, rocky and rough.

International bodies and other countries have become more and more vocal about denominating reserves in nearly anything but the dollar.  Can you imagine why?  They are prudent in seeking that economic shelter from the coming storm.

We must fully repudiate deficit spending now, or we will be forced to repudiate domestic and international fiduciary obligations that will make us true international pariahs, and put us into a deep, deep depression.  And we do not want to pay that price.

Honestly, we should be out in the streets right now as they just were in Egypt.

$100 billion in cuts?  Give me a break.  It should be $1.6 trillion.  This year; not over the next 10 years. Now.

Obama tried it all. Closing Guantanamo. Ending the war. Civilian trials for terrorists. The surge.

Now he’s just killing, with a remarkable lack of dissent from his own side (remember: “Bush lied. People died.”).

So we learn from drone operatives (literally) that Obama is, after all, and for solid ‘political’ reasons… a stone killer.

From Newsweek:

Some counterterrorism experts say that President Obama and his advisers favor a more aggressive approach because it seems more practical—that administration officials prefer to eliminate terrorism suspects rather than detain them. “Since the U.S. political and legal situation has made aggressive interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is less reason to seek to capture rather than kill,” wrote American University’s Kenneth Anderson, author of an essay on the subject that was read widely by Obama White House officials. “And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position because it removes potentially messy questions of surrender.”

Read the whole thing. Personally, I’d trust a soldier on the spot more (even with the messy question of surrender) than a highly paid antiseptic atty on the seventh floor of the CIA.

Besides, some recalcitrant attys are already arguing that the attys with their fingers on the launch button are unlawful combatants because they are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and are not uniformed themselves. Hmmmmmm. Did someone else make that same argument in another context? Issa? Issa?

Congresscritters working today in Washington are going to soon learn a very direct Americanism that I have to use frequently on the on the Indian and Chinese new media programmers I hire overseas:

You’ll have to do better than that.

With a sinking feeling over the last few days, we’ve seen our vaunted promise of $100 billion in budget cuts (less than one tenth of the annual deficit, so insufficient on its face!) shrink to only $32 billion in cuts with all sorts of ‘brilliant’ justifications as to why this must be, or how it’s really more than it seems.

Get this: It’s not enough. You will be primaried.

How can I make this bold assertion?  Look around at the organizations and alliances that helped get you elected; the Tea Party for instance.  Both Tea Party Nation and Patriot Action Network (Resistnet) have formally placed ‘precinct committeeman’ (PC Strategy) activism among their top 2 priorities for 2011.   Three more of the biggest, most well funded activism networks in the country are examining or making moves in that direction.  Erick Erickson has spoken out in favor of this brand of activism and wrote about it in his book.  Many others are figuring it out on their own and just doing it.

Hey!  It’s 2011.  No big elections this year, so we can all go back to sleep, right?  Except many of us have made a different choice.  We are using the hiatus to get on our local party central committees.  And we are bringing others on board with us.  We’re not taking a breather in 2011.  In fact, we are increasing the op tempo.  The honeymoon is over.  Now we are tapping our collective feet, waiting on you.   And we talk to each other.  Nationwide.

An informal, but very active, aggressive alliance has sprung up amongst LUR’s Concord Project, Coldwarrior’s The Precinct Project, and PROCINCT’s party.procinct.net.   More major players will appear soon as part of that alliance soon (formal or informal).  There is a powerful, determined drive underway to fill those vacant, voting seats on all those local central committees.  And many of the party newbies are discovering that a vacuum exists above them to draft them quickly up on the state committees where they cast votes for the RNC committeemen.  We talk to them every week on our conference calls.  Look at the new state chairs for AZ and NH and consider how many state party conventions are still ahead of us in 2011.   These new PC activists are not being quiet or orderly about it.  They are seeking vacancy appointments, alternate appointments and proxies on their central committees if they missed the elections or caucuses.  They are not patient either.  And they are not in a good mood today.

The short story is this: the party that elected you is about to be governed (or at least very strongly influenced) by a new set of bosses.  When the time to file again for office arrives next year, you may find yourself operating in a hostile, alien, foreign environment in your district.  In many areas, the new precinct committeemen will control the vote, so besides the expenses of a primary, you will discover that your media messaging is much more expensive to deliver.  Where you are currently planning on spending $5 million on media, you’ll have to spend $9 million to satisfy opinion movement goals.  And you might just lose that primary anyway.

So to make up for the fact that you put a good scare into many of us today, you’d better resolve now to quadruple Darrell Issa’s staff so he can investigate Pigford, secret deals betraying our special UK relationship, and otherwise sextuple the number of subpoenas he sends flying at this corrupt administration.  For indictments, not just transparency.

Then start cutting.

I mean real cuts that’ll send bureaucrats flying to the TV cameras to scream bloody murder.  Eliminate entire departments and agencies or fully de-fund them.  Want to exhibit some leadership?  Start talking about waste in the DOD and put them on notice that they are looking at budget cuts, too.  You’d better start calling for Obama to task his AG to appoint a special prosecutor.  You’d better start seeking indictments and start wielding a knife big enough to spot from The Gallery.  Many of the Tea Party folk are older and we remember what real budget cuts looked like under Reagan.   Matters little to us if the cuts come from a different branch this time, but we’ll all clearly recognize the pitiful screams and teeth-gnashing on the Sunday morning shows.  Let’s face it: if the bureaucrats aren’t screaming bloody murder, then nobody’s budget is really being cut.  So far, we hear crickets.

Collegiality is for the Senate, so forget about ‘hands across the aisle’ and #newtone.   Budget brutality should be the order of the day – our current fiscal crisis requires it, and your real primary constituents (the PCs who can deliver the vote to you, or to your primary challenger) demand that you summon the courage and leadership to deal with it.

The House controls the purse strings.  Better start pulling.  Hard.

(photo above: ‘Cap the Knife’, Reagan’s OMB director who set many a bureaucratic tooth a-gnashing.  Photo H/T: Wikipedia)

Generals are often the last to know about their victories.   Fragmented reports of a platoon leader accepting an enemy squad’s surrender or a company commander overrunning a position never reach the commander until the staff has confirmed prisoner counts and an inventory of weapons captured.   They know from experience to disregard early reports of both victory and defeat.  It takes a while to assemble fragmented information from various units in the field and confirm a victory.

Smells Like Victory

In local politics where each activist is more or less his or her own general, it’s even tougher to assess victory.  Is it too early to utter the shrill ululation of counting coup after the race for RNC chair and the Texas Speaker didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped?  Let’s examine the evidence with the jaundiced eye of a chief of staff.

Here in Los Angeles county where I serve on the GOP, we did a bit of planning at our biennial caucuses and organizational meeting.  Since the LA GOP is not a continuing body, the organizational meeting first swears and seats the newly elected members who then (usually) accept the by-laws that governed the previous body.

Then the fun starts, and it happens fast.

As had been arranged, I was selected as chair for my own assembly district (one of 26 in LA County).  I then instructed my district committee members (seven of us in all) to attend the succeeding caucuses (ones for senate and congressional districts) and seek the chairs of those caucuses.  They returned from those caucuses with their respective gavels in hand (figuratively).   That gave my one little committee of seven a total of three votes on the county executive committee.  And we are gathering more and can probably soon count on 5 county executive committee votes.  And my district committee has yet to identify or make liaison with the other ‘tea party’ districts in the county.  Wait until that happens.

But there’s more.  Much, much more.  Selection of delegates to the state GOP committee is about to begin.

It’s much easier to join the state committee in CA (and many other places) than one may think.  This would be the same state committee that chooses our RNC Committeemen.  Yes, I am saying that it’s only one step up the party ladder from initial involvement to choosing RNC Committeemen.  Candidates, even unsuccessful ones, for state offices such as assembly or senate, other state offices, and US offices get to appoint state delegates.  Now how many on our local district committee of seven do you think worked those campaigns and are deserving of the appointment?   Since we know the candidates intimately, try seven out of seven.  While no political IOU is bankable until actually paid, we have padded our preliminary counts with enough extra requests of candidates to allow fully for some not coming through for us.

Influence, when it accrues, sometimes accrues very, very quickly.

If it’s happening (fast) in my own corner of the county, then it’s happening in counties (and states) elsewhere.  And even without the victories we wanted so badly recently, the RNC chair and Texas speaker will soon begin showing signs that they heard us clearly.  The RNC Chair already has.

The Tea Parties have no general staff to assess reports and assemble a picture of victory or defeat.  But platoons are reporting in from CA just as Coldwarrior reports (with hard metrics satisfactory to any secretary of the general staff, as pilgrim knows) that the tea party has a 70% plurality in the urban counties in AZ.  Regiments report advances and victories in UT, MI, WI, OH, NY and NV.  Tea Party Nation and Patriotic Action Network (Resistnet) have both placed the PC Strategy at the top of their battle plans for 2011, and these are prize battalions.  Erick at Redstate.com has called for deployment of the PC Strategy in 2011.

When the smell of victory is in the air, even an amateur military historian doesn’t need the centralized authority of a general staff to conclude:

It’s time to conduct a major offensive.

“For two generations we have been trying to make the point that people are not responsible for their own actions,” said Tucson Sheriff Clarence Dupnik in an interview after the recent shooting incident in Tucson, Arizona.  ”We need to extradite the people who were really responsible for this tragic crime.”

Asserting that the writings and rantings of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh were really responsible for the shootings that also injured US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the Tucson Sheriff continued, “There is no reason to blame an innocent actor who had no stature or authority with the US public.   Best practices in our Brave New World suggest that no crisis or tragedy should ever go to waste, and wasting this tragedy on indictment of a previously unknown actor would be a travesty of justice.  Someone with stature and authority must be made to answer for this crime.  Nobody is willing to accept that a ‘nobody’ type of person is actually culpable in such a heinous act.  It’s simply not credible that a previously anonymous, even if troubled, citizen would have the agency to think for himself, make a personal decision, and commit such a violent act.”

People’s Media Prosecutor Paul Krugman agreed with Dupnik.  ”We can’t allow these dangerous thoughts to have traction in the media.  If we attribute to a private actor the concept that people can have their own ideas – even crazy ones – of their own, and if we allow the concept that the killer was uninfluenced by outside thoughts of others, then we give traction to the concept of personal responsibility and that’s simply not an option for our society.  Accordingly, I’m asking the AG to request extradition of Sarah Palin from the State of Alaska and Rush Limbaugh from the State of Florida.  Whenever Loughner put on his tinfoil hat in the mistaken impression that it was a form of protection, his thoughts were actually being controlled by a secret technology deployed by the Palin/Limbaugh cabal.”

“It’s all about ratings and web page hits,” noted Krugman.  ”Nobody ever got 400 comments on a story by attacking a notorious criminal – anybody can do that.  Our society is not served unless we can place the finger of blame on a more prominent public figure seemingly unrelated to the actual event.”

Dupnik continued, “If we consent to the idea that such a horrific crime can be attributed to someone who lacks an Ivy League education, or has not held previous public office or conservative media influence, then other people will get big ideas too.  People could feel empowered to think for themselves and that’s unconscionable in our society.  People might decide to take personal responsibility for their thoughts and actions, and then where would we be?  People might even try to hold others accountable for their actions.  Then people would run for political office and start businesses and the die would then be cast.  We just can’t allow that sort of thought.  We need to act in a manner that holds everyday people blameless, in fact powerless, over their own thoughts and actions.”

Dupnik also used the press conference as an occasion to announce a new task force to address risks of such crimes in the future.  ”We checked with our major vendors and are satisfied that prevention technology as seen in the movie ‘Minority Report’ is just not ready to use in small urban departments.  Accordingly, we have organized the Ouija Task Force to help secure our public officials and prevent such acts in the future.  This task force will make use of proven and well-understood technology to ensure the safety of our public officials.  The miracle of this technology is that neither the surveillants nor investigators need tinfoil headgear – thoughts can be both overheard and implanted with no metallic referent whatsoever and with full information security.”

“We are serving notice on people like Palin and Limbaugh: your crimes will not go undetected and unpunished.”

Richard Cohen puzzles today over how the US military has become a ‘priesthood’ and hauls out nearly every tired, ignorant saw about the military except the one about military intelligence being an oxymoron.

Sorry, Richard, but you indict only yourself in this missive. I’m going to have to answer your blog post point by point, so let’s start with your headline: the US knows all it needs to know of war. Many know far too much if you ever visit Walter Reed. And defending our country (in my book) definitely extends to ensuring that the common citizen does not have to learn much about war. Or its horrors.

Vets returning from Vietnam were indeed spit upon. Here in CA (CA is outside the beltway, Richard) you can still find lots of people who reminisce fondly of having done just that.

Yet one was an army of the people, draftees and such, and the other is an army of volunteers, strangers to most of us.

Strangers to you, you mean. Many of us know them and love them. Since you admit they are strangers, however, you go on to say that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’?

No more. I sometimes think I am the only person around who has been in the military. This is because most people I know are college-educated professionals, many of them writers.

Interesting admission. So even though you served for a short time in the reserves, you admit you are a member of the class (even if you personally did not get an exemption) who got college exemptions and made service in the military during Viet Nam more of a class issue. Please continue with your narrative.

The military of today is removed from society in general.

Removed from your society, you mean. You certainly are doing a great job of informing us of the limitations of your social circles. And your experience. Southerners volunteer for service, to their credit. Northeasterners can too, anytime they wish. Of course, they may not be smart enough to qualify these days.

This is a military conscripted by culture and class – induced, not coerced, indoctrinated in all the proper cliches about serving one’s country, honored and romanticized by those of us who would not, for a moment, think of doing the same. You get the picture.

I certainly do get the picture. Clearly. And the military you and I served in was not conscripted by culture and class? Need I mention those Viet Nam era college deferments again? And you don’t sound as if you are honoring and romanticizing those warriors you would not, for a moment, consider joining. And if serving one’s country is just a cliche, then you should be a politician, not a scribbler.

The other problem is that the military has become something of a priesthood. It is virtually worshipped for its admirable qualities while its less admirable ones are hardly mentioned or known. It has such standing that it is awfully hard for mere civilians – including the commander in chief – to question it.

Like any priesthood, there is a process of admission. It looks like you have already declared yourself and yours unwilling to pay that price of admission. So the mysteries of that priesthood will remain unrevealed to you.

Eisenhower warned of the Congressional-military-industrial complex. The part of his warning we have ignored is the part that afflicts us the worst today!

but now the political cupboard of combat vets is bare and there are few civilian leaders who have the experience, the standing, to question the military

…and that was exactly whose choice? Did the military conspire to exclude these leaders? Did any of these leaders ever, at any point in their careers, take time out to consider just what might outfit them properly for leadership? Hmmmmm.

We kill coldly, for reasons of policy

Yes, we do. Know a better way or reason to wage war? Ever read you some Sun Tsu or Clausewitz?

War is too important to be left to the generals.

Which is why it isn’t. I can’t think of a single US war that was started by a general, can you? All of our wars have been started by civilians or the enemy as I recall. George Washington established the precedent, and of all the policies handed down to us by the founding fathers, civilian control of the military is probably the ideal that has suffered the least. And I might note that it is the military that kept that ideal intact. Civilians in government these days frequently have to be told about this because they don’t know about this principle.

Richard, I’m sure that your college-educated writer friends inside the beltway will congratulate you on your cogent and trenchant views. The rest of us know you a little better, too.

You don’t even have to tap your heels together three times to become an initiate into the priesthood you seem to deplore. You simply have to believe. Believe enough to take that one step forward and raise your right hand. Voluntarily. Not as a ‘coerced’ dodge do avoid regular service.

Once you’ve done that, you are a member of the priesthood for the rest of your life.

Don’t envy a priesthood that you actually want no part of. You have elected to exclude yourself and now you whine?

Update: I have been profoundly embarrased when field grade officers and generals addressed me as ‘Sir’. It feels like an inversion of the proper protocol. But it’s also the miracle that makes our military the best in the world. These officers realize that they work for the civilians. Clinton and Obama both exhibit(ed) profound discomfort at being manifestly unfit to command the world’s greatest military. Yet that very military allowed/allows itself to be commanded by them. The fact that they never bothered to outfit themselves for that command was whose oversight?

If the military are a priesthood, Richard, then you are a member of the godhead that they serve: civilian society. I sense that you, like Obama and Clinton, are manifestly and profoundly uncomfortable with the moral inversion that allows such a splendid instrument to be handled by such grubby hands.