The story goes something like this; given the GOP’s attempt (the so-called “Nuclear Option”) to end the filibuster for Presidential nominations during the leadership of the hapless Frist, certain GOP Senators, like Alabama’s Jeff Sessions and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell are being hypocritical by voting against cloture on President Obama’s nomination of the Left-Wing extremist and disciple of result-oriented jurisprudence that is David Hamilton to 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Of course, this is using that special self-serving Leftard definition of hypocrisy that seeks to apply standards to others that they would never apply to themselves. In what is an eye-opening demonstration of misdirection by omission Milbank wrote this;

… Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), who warned four years ago that “if the filibuster becomes an institutional response where 40 senators driven by special interest groups declare war on nominees in the future, the consequence will be that the judiciary will be destroyed over time.”

On Tuesday, Graham voted to institutionalize the filibuster.

Dana Milbank is not particularly known for honesty or fairness where politics is concerned - after all, he works for the Washington Post. However even he must have found it hard to keep a straight face in trying to make the argument that the Democrats had not already institutionalized judicial filibuster in the eight long years that a Republican President was in the White House.

Let’s be honest here; Republicans are playing by the rules the Democrats set in their years in the minority and Milbank is naturally being willfully dishonest in pretending that this represents a turn-about in Republican’s position on the filibuster. Republicans fought to end it and were only thwarted thanks to John McCain’s usual selfish hankering for some media love - this did not constitute some win-or-lose promise to never filibuster a Democratic President’s nominations.

Ultimately, the Democrats won that fight. Now they are whining that Republicans are refusing to pretend that it never happened and forgo taking advantage of a weapon the Democrats made a part of the rules and gladly used for the past eight years. In other words, to meet Milbank’s definition of “consistency”, since Republicans oppose judicial filibusters against nominees of both parties’ Presidents, Republicans are supposed to settle for ending judicial filibusters against Democratic Presidential nominees while Democrats are free to engage at will against Republican nominees.

Imagine if the Eastern Conference in the NBA agitated for baskets from within the key to count for 1 point. The Western Conference says no, they want the status quo and for baskets within the key to continue to count for 2 points.

There’s a big fight and a big meeting and eventually the Western Conference wins; baskets within the key will continue to be counted as 2 points.

Now, would it not be ridiculous for Western Conference teams to start insisting that Easter Conference team baskets be counted as 1 point because otherwise it would be “hypocrisy” given the Eastern Conference’s past position on the issue? Would Eastern Conference teams not be incandescently stupid to accept such a “deal” in the name of “consistency?”

Exactly.

I would hope that not even the Stupid Party (even with our “comity” and “Bipartisanship” obsessed Senate coterie of “moderates”) is stupid enough to go along with a deal that says Republican Presidents need 60 votes to confirm their judges while as Jeff Sessions put it, Republicans must “… acquiesce into a philosophy that says that Democratic presidents can get their judges confirmed with 50 votes.”

Turnabout is fair play.

Four years later, Election Night 2008 and it was Republican Norm Coleman with the highest number of votes against Al Franken in the race for the Senate. Yet today, Norm Coleman is a private citizen and Al Franken is a United States Senator representing the state of Minnesota in Washington DC.

I’m going to avoid rehashing the blatant fraud and larceny perpetrated by the Democratic machine in King County in the 2004 race and focus instead on the more recent case of Norm Coleman.

There is not much of a need to recap in full the very worst case of out and out election theft in decades, perpetrated by the Minnesota Secretary of State in open collusion with the Franken campaign, the liberal Democrats and Fifth Column Republicans (hereafter known as “Scuzzies” - in (dis)honor of fake Republican DeDe Scozzafava) more concerned with appearing “bipartisan” to the media than protecting the votes of the people of Minnesota on the so-called “bipartisan” canvassing board that conducted the “recount.”

Suffice it to say; can there be any doubt that the fix was in when the ballot below qualified as a vote for Al Franken;

… but this (below) “strangely” did not qualify as a vote for Norm Coleman?

PS: The above episode was brought to you courtesy of the Soros funded SOS (Secretaries of State) Project; the aim of which to get individuals who have sworn to actively slant the process, lie, cheat and steal to ensure that Democrats win elections whether or not they actually get the higher number of votes (like Minnesota SOS Mark Ritchie, a direct beneficiary) elected to state Secretary of State positions (in charge of conducting elections) around the country.

Handsomely paid off in Minnesota, didn’t it?

John Lott sounded the alarm as the theft was happening in a definitive piece for FOXNews. So did the guys at Powerline and quite a few other people in the Right-blogosphere - including myself. Even without the hundreds of fake voters registered by ACORN and any number absentee ballots that made it through their offices, Coleman’s failure to garner more than a 2% of the vote over Franken probably doomed him to lose his lead with Mark Ritchie in the Secretary of State’s office.

Not only were ballots clearly marked for Coleman rejected while similarly marked ballots were awarded to Franken, when the manual recounts in various precincts came up with a lower number for Franken, the machine counts were adopted by the Mark Ritchie-led canvassing board - if the manual count favored Franken, Mark Ritchie and his cronies discarded the machine count. Votes for Franken in a certain precinct were counted twice, giving the precinct more votes than voters on election day. And finally, the canvassing board voted to count ballots “discovered” by Democratic election judge in his car trunk and add the Franken favoring result to the totals.

By the time the lawyers took over, the fat lady had sung her heart out. Franken had won.

But, despite it all, I’m not mad at Franken and his Campaign’s allies (apparently in both parties) in the canvassing board and the Secretary of State’s office. The determination to win and win at any cost is not an entirely unattractive trait - would that more Republicans would be so steel-spined in DC and the state capitals. As the story of the scorpion and the frog reminds us, you can’t expect a scrorpion to act like anything other than a scorpion and you can’t be mad that he stung you - that’s just what scorpions do. Voter fraud is as much a standard Democratic political tool as levelling allegations of racism, “hate” and claiming to be the victim of “death threats”.

Who I am really mad at is Norm Coleman, the NRSC, the RNC and the MNGOP. Even as John Lott, Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker, etc. were pointing out that they were being robbed in broad daylight, they did absolutely nothing. Much like the so-called Republican members of the canvassing board, they, especially Coleman who had run as a “moderate” were too concerned with appearing “bipartisan” to lift up a finger to protect the victory until it was too late.

The entire GOP nationwide should have hailed down a storm of fire and brimstone on Mark Ritchie and his fellow thieves. They should have run ads all over Minnesota, mounted protests, etc. As I wrote back then; “… the fact that the MNGOP is not running ads, calling daily Press Conferences, and inundating the air waves with loud denunciations of this incredibly blatant abuse of the public trust is incomprehensible.”

Which brings us to today. The race is neck and neck between Republican Chris Christie and the incumbent Jon Corzine in New Jersey. Whether or not this is because of “Independent” Chris Daggett, the man being sponsored by the Democratic Party and the deep pockets of Jon Corzine to split the anti-incumbent vote and thereby ensure Corzine gets to continue his misadministration in Trenton for the next four years, is not the issue.

The SIEU (i.e. ACORN) and the Democrats, as expected, have filed suit to ensure that at least 3000 of their manufactured voters be allowed to cast absentee ballots. These voters are known to be fake because their signatures are wildly different from that on file. As John Fund informs;

Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey’s secretary of state asking her “to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.” Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis” and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots, of course, would then provide a pool of votes that would be subject to litigation in any recount, with the occupant of New Jersey’s highest office determined by Florida 2000-style scrutiny of ballot applications.

What the Democrats are hoping for is a replay of Minnesota - where a bunch of Scuzzies to provide “bipartisan” cover, a partisan Secretary of State and liberal Democrats would blatantly steal the election for their candidate while the Republican is too terrified of offending liberal journalists to do a thing about it.

The question is whether or not Chris Christie is prepared (unlike Norm Coleman) to defend his victory in the post-Election battles that have become far too common in American politics since Al Gore called Bush to withdraw his concession in 2000. The instant the polls close tonight, the Christie Campaign should be on war footing, with advertising dollars ready to blanket the airwaves and loudly trumpet every act of theft and fraud by whatever body is put in charge of overseeing any recount, no matter how many times it is emphasized that the body “Bipartisan” and therefore holy and above reproach.

Christie should not make the mistake of aping Norm Coleman’s strategy of grinning and bearing it in a bid to appear “moderate” and “above the fray”. There will be shrieks from liberal columnists on print and broadcast warning Christie not to fight it and even to concede even if he is in the lead. The Democrats will certainly accuse him of voter suppression, “hate” and “death threats”. But this is standard operating procedure - he would be accused of it no matter how politely and quietly his campaign objects to votes found next week in Jon Corzine’s home in New York being added to the tally. Or even if he says nothing at all.

Fire and brimstone, Mr. Christie. Unleash the dogs of hell.

This time it was the Governor’s race between liberal Democrat Creigh Deeds and conservative Republican Robert McDonnell. Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Regents University and in his thirties, Bob McDonnell wrote;

Republican concerns for fiscal austerity are easily impaled by an additional $1.3 billion a year in expenses. Surely the leadership recognizes that existing federal child-care programs already cost more that $6.9 billion in 1988. Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.

Washington Post “macaca” operative Amy Gardner read the above few sentences, stripped it bare of context and reported it thus;

Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family.

Needless to say, Amy Gardner’s er … “report” provoked Outrage!!!™ on the Left, with shrieks for McDonnell’s head on every Lefty blog, and front page stories and editorials in the Washington Post as it moved to “macaca” Bob McDonnell. Unfortunately for the Left (both online and offline) and their allies running the Washington Post, the people of Virginia are not buying the attempt to convince them that McDonnell is going to transform Virginia into some facsimilie of the planet Gor and have women stripped naked, chained to stoves and relegated strictly to cooking, cleaning and bearing children.

In retrospect this was probably foredoomed to failure since the Left never bothered to investigate any further past Amy Gardner’s deliberately misleading hit piece to launch the Washington Post’s “macaca” operation against Bob McDonnell. As it turned out, Virginians got introduced to Bob McDonnell’s career-having wife, two working daughters with advanced postgraduate degrees (one of whom served in Iraq) and his many choices of Deputy Attorneys General who happen to be women.

Nonetheless, the Online Left is still outraged at Bob McDonnell’s obvious sexism and hatred of women. Outraged, I tell you!

Whose writings are not provoking outrage on the Online Left?

A guy named Kevin Jennings - who once wrote a few interesting things in his books, not least of which includes the forward to a book (”Queering Elementary Education”) outlining a crusade to introduce elementary school (6-12 year olds) kids to the “Queer” lifestyle  - I quote Human Events;

In his book One Teacher in Ten … he tells about a young male sophomore, “Brewster,” who confessed to Jennings “his involvement with an older man he met in Boston.” But at a GLSEN rally in 2000, Jennings told a more explicit version of “Brewster’s” story. Jennings here quotes the boy and then comments: “‘I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.’ High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people.”

Did Jennings report this high-risk behavior to the authorities? To the school? To the boy’s parents? No — he just told the boy, “I hope you knew to use a condom.” Sex between an adult and a young person below the “age of consent” (which varies from state to state) is a crime known as statutory rape, and some states mandate that people in certain professions report such abuse.

Like teachers. Like teachers in the school where this occurred, where Jennings was a teacher.

Now why would Kevin Jennings not report the incident? Let’s look to his words again;

One of the people that’s always inspired me [Kevin Jennings] is Harry Hay, who started the first ongoing gay rights groups in America.

Now watch this video;

Then read this interview of Bob Hamer, the undercover FBI agent featured in the video, especially this part;

If NAMBLA had a Hall of Fame, [Harry] Hay would be a member.  Hay fought for NAMBLA’s inclusion in the International Lesbian and Gay Association and once carried a sign proclaiming “NAMBLA Walks With Me.”  Although Hay died before I was invited to attend any of NAMBLA’s secret, underground meetings, Hay was a featured speaker at several NAMBLA conferences and at forums on man/boy love.

Now read this (if you can stomach it) - a speech given by the man who has most inspired Kevin Jennings in his life;

I also would like to say at this point that it seems to me that in the gay community the people who should be running interference for NAMBLA are the parents and friends of gays. Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world. And they would be welcoming this, and welcoming the opportunity for young gay kids to have the kind of experience that they would need.

Now, let’s put it all together. The man Barack Obama chose to be his “Safe Schools Czar” proudly (because he has stood on stages to repeat this story and written it in a book with nary a trace of apology or regret) chose not to protect a child from being sexually taken advantage of by an older male - in fact, he encouraged the child to return back to his abuser - his only warning to remind the boy to carry a condom. He openly claims as his inspiration a man who co-founded of an organization of pederasts, who advised parents that making their thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year old sons available for sex with adult men is the best thing they could do for them.

This does not outrage the Left. In fact, what outrages them is that reasonable questions (especially given Jennings’ self-confessed story about Brewster) are being asked about Jennings’ suitability for the job he currently holds in the Obama Administration.

Nothing Kevin Jennings has written, said or done outrages the Online Left - or the media.

But McDonnell’s thesis - which didn’t even say what the Left imagines it does - continues to outrage the Online Left.

Nuance is the mantle intellectuals like to don when they espouse ideas that slap common sense in the face.

So I clicked over to Paula’s blog to see what brought on that slice of genius … and my mouth dropped open at the sheer incandescence of the stupidity Paula was grappling with. It was an op-ed by a Matthew Manweller; an associate professor of Political Science at Central Washington State University, published in the Seattle Times a few days ago. He also happens to be a member of the Washington State Republican Party Executive Committee.

He’s also an idiot, notwithstanding his obvious self-regard as some sort of intellectual. Or a Democratic plant. I don’t believe there is any other explanation for what he’s proposing that the Republican Party do to itself in 2010. Either way, it’s Republicans like him that make the Committeeman Project (which I apologize for completely neglecting - and in the cause of which ColdWarrior has been an absolute wonder to behold) so absolutely necessary.

Get this; this is Manweller’s brilliant idea for Republicans to regain the majority; not challenging vulnerable Democrats.

GOP Chairman Michael Steele should not go after the “Blue Dog Democrats” in 2010. This small group of representatives has shown themselves to value practicality over ideology. They have been willing to compromise, change their minds and even oppose their own party when necessary, characteristics that should be valued regardless of one’s own political affiliation.

This was supposedly John McCain’s trump card in 2008, according to his Primary boosters. His willingness to compromise and oppose his own party in the name of “Bipartisanship” and reaching across the aisle, his Maverick™ credentials, his popularity with the chattering classes would have the silent “moderate” majority rise up and pour money into his campaign coffers, man the phone banks and walk the precincts and then march into the poll booths to pull the lever next to John Sidney McCain III.

But that’s not what happened now, was it? It turns out the voters didn’t particular care about McCain’s catalog of “Bipartisan” accomplishments or admire his history of taking sides against his own party, including the so-called “moderate” voters that were supposed to recognize a kindred spirit in John the Maverick, and of course he lost to an opponent with the most liberal and partisan voting record in the Senate.

More will be lost than gained if the GOP attacks this coalition.

Huh? I simply cannot imagine how any Republican can think reducing the majority Nancy Pelosi has to work with would be a loss. Note again; this man has a seat on the Washington State Republican Party Executive Committee.

What message does it send to conservative Democrats if the GOP assails the very people who were willing to work with them? Republican challenges will simply drive Blue Dogs to seek cover in the liberal wing of their party and make them question why they should ever cross the aisle again. More importantly, what message does it send to the American voter if the GOP seeks to overthrow the very group of people who are actually looking (and thinking) before they leap?

The same message it sent to the American voter when the DSCC spent all that money to take out Susan Collins? The message it would send to the American voter is that Republicans are ready to lead and are willing to step up to the plate. Patton was right, and it was only after 40 years in which it completely escaped a Republican Party led by the likes Nelson Rockefeller and Bob Michel that it finally clicked with the GOP Leadership; Americans respond to winners, to confidence, not people who plan to be “gracious” losers.

The fact that Manweller - a member, I remind you, of a Republican State Executive Committee - actually seems to believe that these so-called “conservative” Democrats are not voting for the President’s Left-Wing agenda because of anything other than self-preservation is proof that education is no substitute for intelligence. And given that, does this cretin honestly believe that removing the threat of being challenged would serve as encouragement for them to continue “looking (and thinking) before they leap?”

If Republicans win a majority on the backs of Blue Dogs, they will look cynical in victory and send a message that the desire for power trumps a commitment to rational discourse and the politics of cooperation.

Cynical to whom? This is the sort of argument that lets one know without a shadow of the doubt that the person making it is severely out of touch with reality. Try to imagine the illogic of this argument. This Democratic plant is trying to sell the asinine argument that the same people who voted out their Democratic Congressman for being a vote for Nancy Pelosi to hold the Speaker’s gavel would immediately eye the man (or woman) they voted to replace him negatively for actually running and winning their votes.

Huh?

I submit that the only people to whom a Republican successfully challenging a so-called “Blue Dog” would look “cynical” to are the liberal chattering class twits that this Manweller is obviously trying to impress with this op-ed. May I remind you all again that Manweller is a member of the Washington State Republican Party Executive Committee?

Such a victory would not be good for America. After having lost the trust of the American people in 2006, the GOP needs to show that they can put country above partisan gain.

And the only way, according to this member of a Republican Party Executive Committee, for the Republican Party to regain the trust of the American people (showing that he is strangely, for his position in the WAGOP, not at all conversant with current polling) and show that they are capable of putting the country above partisan gain is for the GOP to deliberately lose in 2010. That, according to a member of the WA Republican State Executive Committee would be good for America.

Words fail me …

The Beltway glitterati, not least among them the Davids Brooks and Frum, were falling all over themselves in the aftermath of John McCain’s campaign for Gracious Loser in Chief in advising Republicans to jettison all those icky social conservatives and limited government weirdos and instead cater more to “Republicans” like Colin Powell, Christie Whitman and Lincoln Chafee. Republicans, according to the New York Times editorial page and other well-meaning outlets, would do better to make these types of “Republicans” - “Republicans” who contribute to Democrats, endorse Democrats, campaign for Democrats and vote for Democrats - the face of the GOP. If only Republicans would put these types of Republicans in Leadership positions, the story goes, and follow their example (especially by voting for Democrats on Election Day) somehow, Republicans would be back in the majority again.

I honestly thought no one was taken in by the obviously self-serving load of tripe from liberal commentators and their supposedly “conservative” boot-lickers. At least no one in any position of authority in the GOP. Well, I apparently thought wrong.

I’m really curious … how many people here honestly believe Matthew Manweller is not a Democratic plant? Or is this just Frum-level stupidity? Either way, how in the name of all that is Holy did he end up on the principal policy making body of the Washington State Republican Party? And how soon can he get booted off?

Then he (as he says), derisively referring to a video stalker working for the Webb campaign’s mohawk style haircut, uttered one fateful three-syllable word; “macaca” - which supposedly was a racial slur in Morocco or French Tunisia sometime in the 1940s and ’50s.

Whatever the case, over the next few weeks until Election Day, on the basis of “macaca” George Allen found himself having to face charges on the front pages of Virginia’s newspapers, often leveled by anonymous “sources” or supposedly “neutral” witnesses that upon deeper investigation were revealed to be highly partisan actors that he was an unrepentant white supremacist who once stuffed a severed deer’s head in a black family’s mailbox and nicknamed college football teammates after KKK Grand Wizards.

Leading the charge was the Washington Post - the editorial board and reporting staff of which put out over a 100 articles and editorials, more than a dozen on the front page, in about half as many days on “macaca” - all very obviously deliberately calculated to plant the perception in the minds of the Virginia electorate that George Allen was a racist bigot just in time for the General Election - which Allen lost to Jim Webb by less than 1%.

The Washington Post had successfully swung an election to favor its chosen candidate … and three years later, it’s trying to repeat the same feat - this time in the upcoming Virginia Governor’s race.

Republican Bob McDonnell is comfortably ahead of Democrat Creigh Deeds in the race to be the next Governor of Virginia. And the Washington Post, very clearly co-ordinating with the Deeds Campaign and the Virginia Democratic Party apparatus has assigned considerable resources and a significant amount of precious paper real estate into repeating the coup it performed against George Allen to swing the election in favor of Creigh Deeds. However, instead of anything McDonnell has said, the Post’s bloody shirt is a Masters thesis that he wrote while at Regent University in 1989.

WaPo “Staff Writer” Amy Gardner fired the first shot and set the narrative in the very first sentence of her article;

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family.

Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it … at least, not politically correct. Why, Robert McDonnell obviously believes that women should never work outside the home, right?

Er … no.

Patterico co-blogger Amphipolis found it suspicious that only the one word “detrimental” was being quoted to back up what Gardner was obviously trying to convey to her readers. So he decided to take a look at the 93 page thesis paper for himself, something the Washington Post’s writers and editors would certainly know that less than 1% of their readers would bother to do … and of course, he discovered that “… aside from the issue of whether it is even appropriate to imply that a 20-year old college thesis represents his current beliefs, McDonnell is clearly being deliberately misrepresented here.”

Here is the full passage [H/T: Amphipolis] where the words “detrimental”, “working women” and “feminists” - emphasis mine.

Republican concerns for fiscal austerity are easily impaled by an additional $1.3 billion a year in expenses. Surely the leadership recognizes that existing federal child-care programs already cost more that $6.9 billion in 1988. Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.

Personally I would have used the word “care” instead of “nurture” but the point remains the same. Any fair reading of the passage would immediately recognize the argument that McDonnell is making is that government child care programs could end up enabling the establishment of an environment where the primary care-givers of children would not be their parents. Reading the full passage and the rest of the thesis, it is very obvious that Gardner and her editors made the decision to strip out the actual context in which the words in question were used by McDonnell with a clear eye towards influencing the election that is coming up in two months time.

Either way, having found manufactured a “macaca” moment for McDonnell, the next step, already in progress, is saturation coverage of the issue. Day in and day out, co-ordinating and communicating with Democratic operatives, in a bid to drive down McDonnell’s support just in time before the voters go to the polls. So far, according to Jim Geraghty over at the Campaign Spot, the Washington Post’s coverage of the thesis “scandal” is “up to two front-page stories, three inside stories, two columns, one house editorial and one cartoon …” in the past week.

Now, so far, notwithstanding the joyful comments of liberals celebrating the “macaca” issue that would take down McDonnell, it doesn’t look like it’s working; the most recent polls (Rasmussen) show that McDonnell continues to maintain a solid 9-point lead over Deeds even after the WaPo’s wall-to-wall coverage of the thesis and despite the apparent decision by the Deeds Campaign and the entirety of the Virginia Democratic Party establishment to ride the “pressing” issue of McDonnell’s 20 year old dissertation to victory.

However, this is just one week - and from reading the WaPo’s headlines, articles, columns and the house editorial all pushing the McDonnell as theocratic sexist troglodyte meme, the newspaper is obviously in it for the long haul - if the Washington Post had halted its “macaca” campaign against George Allen after just one week, he’d be the current senior Senator from Virginia.

The issue therefore, that the McDonnell campaign has to address is that of one of the nation’s two most influential newspapers using all its resources to cast him as a clear and present danger to the rights and livelihoods of Virginia’s entire female population on a daily basis (very conveniently) right around the time voters are fully paying attention. The influence of the Post, its ability to set the agenda and the liberal orientation of most Beltway journalists, means that practically every newspaper in Virginia, the other nationals, TV stations and the wire services, based entirely on the deliberate misrepresentation of McDonnell’s views by a dishonest partisan journalist working for a dishonest partisan newspaper, are going to be covering the race as a matter of whether or not Virginia is going to elect a Governor who wants to keep women barefoot, pregnant and chained to the stove - just like in 2006, where the Senate race was recast as whether or not Virginians would vote to send a Klansman to represent their state in the United States Senate.

If McDonnell allows this to happen, the next two months are going to be harrowing grinds as the Washington Post and the rest of liberal Virginia Fourth Estate goes to the mat to drive down his polling numbers. Like I commented a while back, the Republican candidate’s number one enemy is a partisan liberal Press Corps that has successfully sold itself to the American people as being non-partisan, objective, disinterested chroniclers of facts. As I wrote in January in Bob McDonnell’s own RedState diary about his campaign;

[2] The VA media is as liberal as they come. Do not, under any circumstances take positive mention today as any form of indication of how they’ll treat you tomorrow. They will oppose you, they will come after your family and friends and they will blow any gaffes of yours wildly out proportion to help the Democratic candidate. Have a media response team ready to wargame the coverage of events as they happen and keep your campaign one step ahead of the curve.
Hold regular press conferences to inform the public and to forcefully correct the record when distorted. Face every problem or so-called controversy head-on. Record every interaction with the Press and every interview and upload as soon as possible.

Fool me once, shame on you …

The question now is, what is McDonnell and his campaign going to do about this?

A wise man is said to be the man who learns from his mistakes - the wiser man is the guy who doesn’t just learn from his own mistakes, he learns from the mistakes of others. The McDonnell campaign (and the Republican Party of Virginia) should therefore turn a critical eye toward the Allen 2006 campaign’s reaction as “macaca” grew from a stray innocuous comment into a conflagration that ended up with George Allen mounting the podium to give the concession speech - and head off any chances of history repeating itself.

The first mistake Allen made was attempting to ignore it even as the Washington Post ran front page after feature story after column after editorial advancing the Klansman meme on the strength of “macaca”, publishing and giving credibility to every single bit of innuendo and unverifiable story to lend it weight - the journalistic equivalent of inflicting the “death of a thousand cuts.” The second was that when he finally addressed the issue he allowed himself to be put on the defensive. The third was assuming that he was dealing with good-faith actors and therefore that that it would (rightly) blow over once he addressed it. The fourth was his mealy-mouthed 60-second advertisement begging calling for a “return to the real issues” when that didn’t pan out, without openly calling out the parties that had made it the be-all end-all of the campaign.

My opinion at the time, was that Allen should have started October and seized control of the narrative with a brutal prime-time speech calling out his critics. I even wrote a speech that I thought he could give to that effect. Alas, it was not to be.

So here’s my advice to the McDonnell Campaign; do not ignore the issue. This does not mean the Campaign should allow itself to be distracted away from rolling out its policies on education, energy, transportation, etc. but it should be cognizant of the fact that it won’t get the chance to implement those policies if it allows itself to be bled to death by allowing mendacious attacks on the character of the candidate to go unchallenged on the pages of the nation’s most influential paper. Second, get off the defensive - McConnell was very clearly deliberately misrepresented by the Washington Post’s politically motivated cherry-picking of his words to drive down his support in the polls. Third, openly acknowledge the fact that the news editors and reporters covering Virginia politics for the Washington Post are not good faith actors and act based on that fact. Fourth, publicly call them out on what they’re doing, denounce them in no certain terms and demand that they stop and return to the issues that truly matter to Virginians, not their own petty partisan concerns.

Republicans need to realize that the only way past a ginned-up and hyped-up “controversy” or “scandal” without being mortally wounded is by going through it - by publicly confronting the people pushing it and their enablers in the Press Corps (in this case, they are one and the same). In the age of YouTube and blogs, the aphorism that one should avoid annoying someone “who buys ink by the barrel …” no longer applies. In this case the Washington Post has shown that it is out to destroy Bob McDonnell - there’s absolutely nothing to be gained by enabling the WaPo to keep up the pretense that their all-Thesis-all-the-time coverage is anything other than a partisan political operation.

To illustrate; Geraghty notes that on Tuesday (Sept 01) Bob McDonnell held a Press Conference at a High School to unveil his plan to increase the percentage of Virginia’s education dollars that go to the classroom to 65% - leading to a jump of up to $480 million going into classroom items and instruction instead of bureaucracy and administration. All except for one question by the reporters was about “The Thesis.” The Washington Post’s front page article, obstensibly about the education plan is titled; “Thesis Controversy Builds as Robert F. McDonnell (R) Tries to Move On” and devoted only 37 words to the proposal … the rest focused on “The Thesis.” WaPo blogger Anita Kumar’s title on her blog about the same plan? “McDonnell Unveils Proposal, Avoids Thesis Talk”.

Who would know, from reading the headlines, that just the day before, McDonnell conducted a 90 minute conference call answering questions on “The Thesis” from journalists, among whom were journalists from the Washington Post itself? To me, this answers any question about whether or not the WaPo’s editors and reporters are acting in good faith firmly in the negative. Get this; right now, the Creigh Deeds campaign has put out more Press Releases on “The Thesis” than all of Deeds’ issue positions combined. And to show that this is a coordinated political assassination being undertaken by the Post on behalf of the Deed’s campaign, the Post has done more articles on “The Thesis” than on all of Deeds’ issue positions combined. And do note that Deeds won the Democratic nomination thanks the WaPo’s heavy endorsement and torpedoing of his opponents in the Primaries.

This is nothing more than a political assassination, and the people of Virginia need to have it made clear as loudly and as clearly as possible.

Now, if I were an advisor to the McDonnell campaign, I would advise the candidate, at the earliest opportunity, to have one of his spokeswomen schedule a Press Conference in Northern Virginia, with his wife and daughters, his female campaign staffers, women he has served and worked with in the military, in private business and in public office and a smattering of his higher profile female supporters, (e.g. Sheila Johnson - co-founder of BET and a fixture in VA Democratic politics who chaired Tim Kaine’s inauguration committee) at the podium.

Then, the spokeswoman should take aim and open fire with both barrels. In my ideal world;

• First of all, she should point out forcefully that McDonnell is being very blatantly misrepresented as Amphipolis pointed out. Second, she should openly call out the Washington Post as deliberately working to swing an election towards its favored candidate by trying to gin up fear amongst Virginia’s female voters that McDonnell is a threat to their careers and livelihoods. She should point out the fact that the Deeds Campaign has put out more press releases and the Washington Post has run more articles on this non-issue than they have on Creigh Deeds proposed plans for Virginia if he were to be elected Governor. She should point out that Deeds has put forward no plans for transportation, energy and jobs for Virginia, and an education plan that is nothing more than a warmed up version of the status quo - and suggest that that is why the Deeds Campaign and the Washington Post would prefer to focus a 100% of their attention on a non-issue like a 20 year old college thesis - which they misrepresented in the first to gin up this so-called “controversy.”
• Next, she should highlight the women standing with her on the podium as real life answers to the ridiculous clearly politically-motivated questions of whether or not Bob McDonnell as Governor would pose a threat to the working women of Virginia. Point out that not only is his wife a woman who has a career outside the home, all three of his daughters are working women and two of them holds Masters’ degrees (one of them in Computer Science). She should also point out that the majority of his Campaign staff happen to be women whom he hired because they were the best for the job he hired them to do. Next she should point out that he has done the same, hired and worked with the best person for the job, regardless of gender, in military life and in private and public life.
• Next (and this would be great political theater), she should ask any of the reporters present to raise their hands if they believe that if elected, Bob McDonnell would rescind the right of women in Virginia to vote? Do any of them believe that he’ll try to get legislation passed to make educating girls illegal? What about legislation to get all working women in Virginia fired from their jobs and forced to stay at home - is there anyone present who honestly believes that this is what Bob McDonnell has planned to get done as the next Governor of Virginia? If no one raises their hand - (trust me) no one will - she should then wonder why this non-issue has become the most important issue in this race for the Virginia press - especially the Washington Post, instead of the issues which concern Virginians, the economy, education, transportation, energy and jobs, all of which McDonnell has rolled out plans and policies for, while Creigh Deeds is desperately focusing all his attention on a 20 year old thesis - which was misrepresented in the first place? No wonder, after a full week(s) of non-stop coverage of this non-issue to help him catch up, he’s still well behind in the polls - Virginians have seen that he has nothing to offer.
• And finally, the spokeswoman should turn her attention to the Washington Post and ask a few questions such as;[1] Given that it has not been standard practice at the Washington Post to go searching through the college essays of candidates - especially considering that no such effort was expended to seek out either Barack Obama or John McCain’s college theses last year - who put Amy Gardner up to looking for Bob McDonnell’s Regent University Masters’ Thesis? Has she (or any other ) made any effort to seek out Creigh Deeds’ college writings as well?
• [2] Considering the deliberate misrepresentation of what McDonnell wrote, how much input did the Deeds campaign or any of its operatives have in the writing of Amy Gardner’s article? Have there been any discussions with members of the Deeds campaign or Virginia Democrat Party officials and Washington Post editorial staff regarding the coverage of the so-called “Thesis” controversy? Are there any understandings regarding access that have been reached between the Washington Post and a future Creigh Deeds administration in Richmond?
• [3] etc.
• She should then end it with saying that this issue is over and done with. McDonnell has addressed it extensively via his conference call and in every interaction with the Press ever since. He would answer no more questions on the topic because it is now obviously a partisan distraction designed to influence Virginia’s voters with a false impression of him and swing the election over to Creigh Deeds. Furthermore, while respecting their rights to publish whatever they want, true or false, objective or partisan, until the Washington Post discloses what role the Deeds’ campaign or Virginia Democratic Party played in the decision to misrepresent Bob McDonnell and make the resulting controversy front and center of the campaign, the campaign would no longer take any questions from their reporters.

And oh yeah … the McDonnell should have the entire thing on YouTube within the hour.

And I think that would be game, set and match. And who knows? Perhaps it would herald a reconsideration of the relationship between the GOP and the partisan liberal Press.

David Gregory had some guests on Meet The Press to discuss this “unique“, “unprecedented” turn of events.

PS: Ever notice that every time a Democrat encounters opposition or gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he/she immediately claims to be the recipient of “death threats”? And the media faithfully report as if it were true? I’m convinced now that it’s as much a shut-up technique as the typical liberal’s cry of “RAAAAAAAAAACISSSSSSSSST!!!” when losing an argument.

Personally, I’m disturbed that neither Armey nor Coburn recognized and took the opportunity to really let David Gregory have it on his and Fourth Estate’s hypocrisy. Where has he been the last eight years? Where was this concern for civil discourse and respect for the Presidency when the President wore an ‘R’ behind his name? Oh yes, I know … sneering at the President in the White House Press Room. The double standard is beyond blatant. It actually gets up and slaps you in the face.

Bush with a Hitler mustache has been the feature of every Left-Wing march and protest for eight years, even before 9/11 and the Iraq War. This is not to mention the posters (and a movie) calling for his assassination, accusing him of bringing down the Twin Towers, etc. and every other evil under the sun. That Rachel Madcow Maddow, once of Air America where this was SOP for eight years is claiming outrage at this is enough hypocrisy by itself to curdle milk.

Not a single member of the MSM batted an eyelid at all this for eight long years. In fact their typical response is perfectly illustrated by CNN’s disgrace of a former employee Susan Roesgen when she saw Bush being portrayed as Hitler with devil horns in 2006 - amusement and as a hook for her story.

Obama on the other hand, gets the exact same treatment and Roesgen, like the rest of her so-called impartial objective hack brethren, goes crazy.

So all this so-called “concern” by the Fourth Estate about the President being compared to Hitler and the “harsh tone” is really nothing more than whining that their new god is getting a taste of what his predecessor endured without complaint and with their tacit approval and even assistance for the whole of his two terms.

I fully expect that, as David Letterman increasingly comes under fire, the Left’s pet Republicans, i.e. the Davids Frum and Brooks, Meghan McCain, Kathleen Parker and newly minted “moderate” Peggy Noonan would explode unto our screens to come squarely down on David Letterman’s side - chiding Palin for “overreacting” and warning her that her anger at having her teenage daughter(s) attacked by a 62 year old man on national television would “turn off” “centrists” because it would be seen as “far to the Right” behavior. Kathleen Parker would probably write that Willow deserved it for having such a horrible mother in the first place, and Peggy Noonan would earnestly assure us that Letterman - deep deep down inside his soul - feels diminished and sorry about it - just like, she assures us, Ted Kennedy feels nothing but regret and sorrow for his attack on Robert Bork.

The brackets above are to indicate the fact that Letterman has apologized for - as he’d have it - inadvertently attacking 14 year old Willow Palin when he really meant to attack Bristol Palin - which apparently makes it all better.

That said; to explain the title, I believe in the concept that in politics, one should not use an M16 on an enemy when a perfectly good JDAAM is available - unlike the typical celebrity-worshipping “moderate” Republican I believe that the Palins are under-reacting.

David Letterman attacked their daughter on national television. Issuing a Press Release, no matter how strongly worded, just seems not quite commensurate as a response to a 62 year old man joking about a 14 (or 17) year old being raped in a stadium, to his audience’s appreciative hoots and applause, and repeating a joke along those lines the very next night.

A boycott of sponsors won’t work - I say this because I’ve seen calls for a Great Conservative Boycott dozens of times on a myriad of subjects, only for the whole thing to fizzle after a week or less. It’s a pipe dream as far I am concerned.

I would instead recommend a video response; with Todd and the Governor facing the camera and tying this episode firmly around Letterman’s neck, ending with Governor Palin quietly asking Letterman to extend the same courtesy he continues to extend to President Obama’s two beautiful daughters to her children - partisanship should take a back seat to basic decency. First of all, this should be uploaded to YouTube, LiveLeak, etc.

Next, have a web page for contributions so it can be put on the air, nationally.

Letterman’s sponsors would respond very quickly.

John Ziegler just demonstrated the picture-perfect attitude to take towards the “reporters” and “anchors” at any and all of the Democratic networks; ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

Some variant of disdain, contempt or somewhere in between. No liberal-talking point assertion or premise should be left unchallenged. Openly and repeatedly question their honesty and integrity. Highlight their hypocrisy in their coverage. Change the subject when you feel like it or stay on a subject even if they want to move on. Ask them questions that they have to answer before the interview can go further.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking; Ziegler only made a few mistakes as far as I can see;

1. not directly asking Contessa Brewer if she thinks it’s fine that David Letterman attacked Palin’s 14 year old daughter and why she didn’t show that part of Letterman’s act? Why is she deliberately ignoring the attack on Willow Palin? As a mother, would she let it slide? Is she a mother? Why is she and her network trying to make the American people think Palin was only complaining about the attack on her while deliberately, dishonestly, keeping the creepy attack on her daughter off the radar?
2. when Brewer brought up the silly factoid about the poll showing Palin as not being seen as one of the spokesmen for the GOP, he should have pointed it out and dismissed it for the irrelevancy that it is, and pointed out that it’s only out-of-touch journalists who think it’s significant - Palin is the Governor of a vast state, with an environment tougher than any other state, she doesn’t have time to waste on such nonsense as an irrelevant poll.
3. when he touched on the fact of the media portraying the GOP as being solely comprised of old white men {NRSC endorsing Charlie Crist doesn’t help} Ziegler should have added that the only time the media covers Governor Palin is when they’re attacking her with knowingly false Democratic talking points (like Keith Olbermann on “plagiarism”) or from the fever swamps of the Left-wing blogosphere, so of course, the poll results will reflect that.
4. when Contessa Brewer (at 3:50) challenged Ziegler about asking Palin “tough questions“, he should have reacted, first of all, by letting loose with a long and hard laugh. And then he should have answered that the day any reporter at MSNBC stops swooning at Obama’s feet and actually asks Obama a question tougher than “Why are you so soooo dreamy? Can I have your autograph? On my chest?”, that’ll be the day MSNBC can question anyone else on asking tough questions.

But then, I wasn’t the one in the hot seat, I’m critiquing in hindsight, and even with all that Ziegler did very very well in that interview. He was properly mocking, disdainful, disbelieving and made it very clear that he considered Contessa Brewer and her network to be no more than Democratic mouthpieces.

Which happens to have the benefit of being the truth.

Of course, I suspect that our coterie of liberal-elite-approval seeking “moderates” (i.e. Frum, Brooks, Dreher, McCain[s], Gergen, etc.) would be up in arms if this attitude of Ziegler’s were to spread amongst all Republicans and Republican spokesmen. They’ll all troop to the news studios to do what they do best; attack the GOP in exchange for cocktail party invitations or a byline in TIME, Newsweek, The Nation, The New York Times, etc.

Ultimately though, the GOP is never going to regain power, at least enough to make a difference if the Press continues to benefit from the pretense on our side of the aisle that they’re non-partisan actors - they are not. Virtually no Republicans (even including the miniscule number of Vichy “moderate” Republicans) work in the newsrooms of the major networks, CNN and most certainly, MSNBC. A similar situation exists at most of the major newspapers, most especially the NYT and WaPo. And I can’t help but think that this is deliberate on the part of the owners and management, almost all of whom are Democrats and heavy Democratic contributors, i.e. Sumner Redstone, Robert Iger, Ted Turner, Arthur Schultzberger, etc.

A situation like that is no different from having all the networks and major newspapers run from the DNC’s suite of offices in Washington DC. Personnel is policy; in the past, political parties set up newspapers and ensured that they (party and paper) were all singing from the same hymnsheet by only hiring loyal party members and ideological fellow-travellers. News media organs were openly partisan in the editorials and coverage (and even in name i.e. Arkansas Democrat Gazette) - the same situation as it is now, except that back then, they were more honest about it.

In Europe, the papers are openly ideological and often strongly identified with - if not always a 100% supportive of - a political party i.e. In the UK, The Daily Telegraph (Right) - Tories vs The Guardian (Left) - Labour. In France Le Figaro (Right - at least in French terms) - UMP squares off against Le Monde (Left) - Socialists.

The media environment in America is essentially the same, except for the lack of open honesty about leanings and the active efforts to conceal it, e.g. most of the major newspapers severely curtail their reporters from donating to political campaigns and causes and exposing their biases so readers would be able to apply due diligence in reading their work.

Because of the assymetrical balance of media power between the two parties in favor of the other side, it is not a realistic option to demand that Republican politicians “boycott” Democratic networks/outlets. FOX News does not reach a tenth as many people as the networks, CNN, MSNBC, the newspapers and wire services do on a daily basis. A boycott is therefore no different from wholesale abandoning the field of battle.

To be honest, apart from the candidate’s own unfortunate yet typical conviction-free politician’s instinct to outsource his decision making on whether or not he supported the Obama $700 billion Debtulus to “current poll”-driven consultants (who advised to straddle so as not to offend either side and ended with him turning off both), I also blame Rush Limbaugh and his “I hope he fails.” comment for Jim Tedisco’s loss in the NY20 special election.

Don’t get me wrong; it was a perfectly defensible comment - except that Limbaugh failed to defend it where it mattered. The millions of listeners who listen to his show every morning heard him explain what he meant and how he meant it. The many millions more - including voters in NY20 - who have been told repeatedly on broadcast and in print, in movies, television series and in their college classrooms, that Limbaugh’s is a voice of hate, profanity and ignorance, who have never tuned in to listen to him and because of what they’ve heard and absorbed, likely never will, saw and heard what the Obama White House Communications Office and their proxies in the Democratic media wanted them to believe Limbaugh meant.

I believe Tedisco’s numbers began to crater from 12 points up starting from then - and then came his Debtulus straddle. I believed then, as I believe now, that Limbaugh should have gone on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows, the Evening News, Larry King, etc. It might have made a difference in NY20 - it might not. But it certainly would have made the co-ordinated campaign between the White House and the media to proclaim Rush Limbaugh the leader of the GOP much more complicated. Not to mention sending a lot of the Left-Wing fever swamps into orbit with rage - which is good in and of itself.

The Left considers the so-called “mainstream” media i.e. television broadcast and newspapers to be its exclusive domain - they hate to see any member of the Right on their television screens - despite Olbermann, Matthews and Maddow, and anchors and reporters that consistently massage their reports a single appearance by Ann Coulter to spar alone with Matthews and four other liberals is enough to have Kossacks declaring that MSNBC is a “Far Right-Wing” network.

So rather than boycott the Democratic news outlets, conservative Republicans should be clamoring to be on them … with thoroughly rewritten rules of engagement.

To elected Republicans; these people - Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric, Bob Schieffer, George Stephanopolous, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, Contessa Brewer etc. - are not your friends. They’re not neutral observers - they are actively, passionately, on the other side and they consider it a good day when they make you look bad, and they would not hesitate to omit, massage and twist the truth, or even outright lie, to do it. And they rely on your silence, on your going along with them as they pretend to be disinterested non-combatants to make their attacks on you more effective.

So there is nothing wrong in questioning them, challenging them, exposing them and naming names. There’s nothing wrong with making them upset - your existence already accomplished that. It’s simply politics - and it ain’t beanbag. Ignore the feigned disbelieving looks of shock and outraged protestations, the pained shrieks from the Left’s menagerie of domesticated “Republicans” of convenience parachuted in to defend their “impartiality” and press on.

Either force them to openly come out as advocates for one side, or actually begin to actually address the bias caused by their hiring from only one side of the ideological and partisan divide.

The choice should be simple; either be passionate partisan combatants or neutral dispassionate observers. There should be no option to act as the former while demanding to be treated as the latter.

In reaction, the brand new incoming NY Democratic Senate Majority closed ranks around their man and one of their number, State Senator Eric Adams, went so far as to criticize the police for trying to “humiliate” the State Senator-Elect by making such a fuss of his girlfriends bottle-carved face.

Anyway, after a little flash-in-the-pan coverage of the entire incident, the rabidly Democratic/liberal New York media conveniently “forgot” all about Hiram “Slasher” Monserrate and his girlfriend. In case one doesn’t know, the Democratic media and its journalists are very capable of strategically ignoring violence against women for political ends. (see Kopechne, Mary Jo and one Kennedy, Edward Moore).

In other words, given a choice between weakening the Democrats’ hold of the NY State Senate - finally achieved after several long frustrating decades - and not risking that by ensuring that justice is done for a battered woman (as they certainly would have if Monserrate was a Republican), they predictably went with the former.

Which is why Hiram Monserrate just made a big mistake. The only reason his face and that of his erstwhile girlfriend’s with the twenty stitches have been largely off the radar in the NY media, and he hasn’t been hounded into stepping down before he spent a single day in court, was because of the ‘D’ he wore behind his name.

He just exchanged it for the hated ‘R’ - and now the journalists, their editors and all the liberals who have hitherto been all-too-happy to ignore his legal troubles so long as he was a vote for a Democratic Majority Leader are going to suddenly - very conveniently - rediscover their outrage.

Oh well … can’t say I feel sorry for him. I do feel sorry for his girlfriend and I hope she’s fully recovered and carried on with her life. But I feel even more sorry for the people of New York.

My father here is exhibit A right now in everything that is wrong with the Republican party right now. [He’s] a classic, northern Virginia moderate Republican, who felt isolated from the GOP through the continued emphasis on loyalty and social issues, and actually in the end voted for Obama.

I have to agree with the man - it sure does sound like gsy987’s Dad is exactly the type of “moderate” Republican that is everything wrong with the GOP right now. As Specter, Jeffords, Chafee, Schwarz, Leach, Gilchrest, etc. have proven - it is now too much to expect the very basic expectation of partisan loyalty from “moderates”. That would require them to take a side and stick to it, something we all know “moderates” are congenitally incapable of. Let me be blunt; I am yet to see any of the media’s designated “moderates” in the GOP stand strong on an issue the instant it is labeled “divisive” or “controversial”.

So far what I’ve found out is that the bulk of so-called Republican “moderates” are remarkably shallow thinkers with practically no original or worthwhile idea beyond splitting the difference on any of the issues that matter. They outsource their thinking to the liberal Press, to polls, to Beltway Conventional Wisdom, and are forever trying to please Democrats so they can get what they think is “respect.”

If people really want to know why moderates in the GOP get such a bum rap, it is not because of their positions on social issues, but the enervating jumble of cowardice, self-loathing, masochism and Quisling impulse towards capitulating collaboration with the other side when they’re needed most. Add that to the constant whining self-righteousness that they’re not getting the respect they’ll never earn thanks to a manifest lack of principle and conviction, and it’s not that difficult to see why the typical Republican would seriously consider sitting out an election if a “moderate” is on the ballot.

The fact is that when we look at the Democrat’s own “moderates”, we notice a few things. Whenever they’re on print and broadcast, they’re not bashing their own party. They do not call their fellow party members “extremists.” They do not sabotage their own leadership. They do not place Bipartisanship™ above achieving their party’s legislative goals. They do not repeat the other side’s talking points. They do not go on talk radio to agree with Conservative hosts that other Democrats are intolerant knuckle-draggers. They do not proclaim to one and all that the mainstream of their party as “too liberal” or “too far to the Left.” In other words, when it counts, and even when it doesn’t, they’re loyal, they’re Democrats.

But “moderate” Republicans are an entirely different kettle of fish. Now, all indications are that not only do they want to vote with the other side with regards to policy, they want to go along with Democrats on procedural votes (e.g. “Gang of 14″) as well.

Before on RedState, defenders of “moderates” tried to pass off the fantasy that moderates were “staunch fiscal conservatives” even while being social liberals when, to be honest, the only living breathing example of such a creature was Rudy Giuliani and Bill Weld (back when he was a Republican). The “fiscally conservative socially liberal” shibboleth was held on to quite strongly though, that is; until Snowe, Collins, Specter (with able support by “moderate” Govs like Crist and Schwarzenegger) sacrificed the nation’s financial health - not because they thought it would work, they never even read the bill - on the altar of Bipartisanship™ and getting invitations to talk to liberal news hosts on TV. Now, every one of the defenders is silent.

Thanks to their constant badmouthing of their own party, most of the “loyalty is too much to ask of us” “moderates” in Congress (the ones that would have voted with Obama on the ‘Stimulus’) were voted out in 2006 and 2008 by Independents convinced by their own words echoing (as usual) the Democrats that the GOP is full of extremists, “theocrats,” racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-environmental neanderthals. Apparently, according to what passes for “strategy” in “moderate” circles, this “Republicans Suck! Except Me!” message was supposed to prime listeners to troop to the polls on Election Day and pull the lever for the Republican on the ballot.

Which highlights another thing about “moderates” - without the advantage of incumbency or the success of a conservative predecessor to conveniently associate themselves with, they can’t win elections without help from the very same people they spend their time on TV denouncing, including the base they need to carry them over the finish line. Many of the so-called “moderates” that were booted by their district’s voters in 2006 and 2008 only got elected in the first place by riding Reagan’s coat-tails in the 1980s and Gingrich’s coat-tails in 1994.

So here’s my advice to gsy987’s “Republican”-for-Obama Dad, and this is with all due respect; he should switch his registration to Democrat and be done with it. Like Meghan McCain (proving that the apple seldom falls far from the tree) he sounds like someone who sees no redeeming value in the party he claims to be a member of and everything to admire in the Democrat Party - the fact that we nominated John ‘Maverick Moderate’ McCain, the man who for eight years exemplified the capitulating Bipartisanship™ that “moderates” have been clamoring for, the man the New York Times endorsed for us, and yet he voted for Barack Obama anyway, says this more convincingly than any words he (or gsy987) can say to the contrary.

At this point, unless they get over their aversion to loyalty and paralyzing fear of journalist disapproval, “moderates” like gsy987’s Dad are no different from Fifth Columnists - it’s far more harmful to have them within the Tent than without it.

Update (05/14/2009): A little change; I’ve decided to concentrate the number of precincts per county first and the number of currently serving Committeemen in each county before drilling down to the precinct level.

What is the Committeeman Project? Read all about it here. Achance’s comment here neatly captures one of the whys of what we’re doing; returning control of the GOP back to the base and away from the consultants, lobbyist and hack incompetent political operatives in Washington DC and the state capitals.

We need to organize at the precinct, district, and state level so that you cannot win a Republican endorsement, caucus, or primary without being vetted by activist Republicans, rather than a group of lobbyists in a hotel suite or Capitol office.

Rather than waiting for some miracle (H/T: Jack Savage), I’m thinking we can get the ball rolling here on RS by utilizing our numbers and getting answers to some basic questions … just in case.

The beginning of most projects is research. We need to know;

• … how many precincts there are in each of the nation’s 3140 counties,
• … how many and which of these precincts have Republican Precinct Committeemen,
• … what ZIP code (or codes) correspond to a particular precinct,
• … how does one become a Precinct Committeeman in a particular locale (i.e. state, county),
• … etc.

In the following weeks, I will be opening individual diaries for each of the fifty states with their own versions of the following table e.g. when it’s Louisiana’s turn “Parrish” will replace “County” and when it’s Michigan’s turn “Delegate” will replace “Committeeman.” I will be regularly updating the tables in the main body of the diary, relying on my fellow RedStaters via the comments to help me gather the information to input into the fields/columns for each state.

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I firmly believe today that former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s Conservative Resurgence Plan was the best thing to come out of the race for the RNC Chairmanship earlier this year. With its focus on precinct-level organization, it not only provided the best blueprint for rebuilding the Party in locales where it has completely collapsed but also the often neglected aspect of strengthening it where it’s strong so the GOP can be competitive again in every part of the nation. Blackwell promised that, as RNC Chairman, he would spend unprecedented amounts of money and resources to rebuild the Republican Party’s organizational and campaign infrastructure from the most local of levels (i.e. the precinct) on up. The logic of it was simple;

If we are organized at the precinct level, our organizations at [every] other [level] will be [that] much more efficient and productive.

To be specific, the Conservative Resurgence Plan called for the recruitment of a “new generation of precinct leaders” who would be the GOP’s first line of command on the field, interconnected online and operating neighborhood by neighborhood, recruiting volunteers, canvassing and talking to voters, explaining the GOP’s stand on the issues, organizing events, etc. In addition, these “Precinct Organizers” and their lieutenants would have access to a specially developed set of online party-building database, multimedia, voter mapping, fundraising, volunteer management and task tracking applications to enable them inform, plan, coordinate and direct their on-ground activities and resources in their areas of responsibility in and out of campaign season.

The Republican Party must be a civic institution again, with a volunteer base that is active year-round and is given real responsibility beyond showing up at a phone bank. In this last election, it should have been possible for volunteer leaders to organize their precinct or neighborhood for McCain, tasking them with knocking on doors, distributing signs, and most crucially, recruiting other volunteers to build the party exponentially. Instead, virtually all volunteer activity was channeled towards driving casual phone contacts, not personal neighbor-to-neighbor door knocks.

Our technology should give Republican activists the ability to connect with fellow activists at the precinct level. We must encourage the growth of standalone volunteer communities, giving them the tools to organize themselves online, with the official party taking a step back and not trying to control them.

Unfortunately, Ken Blackwell’s campaign never gained any traction within the cliquish environment of the 168 members of the Republican National Committee. I was hoping that when he withdrew his name from the ballot and endorsed Michael Steele, it was a sign that even though his candidacy was dead, his Plan was going to see some semblance of life in Michael Steele’s RNC.

I’m not quite so hopeful anymore.

But then, recently, I started thinking; why wait for the RNC? What, exactly, is preventing Blackwell from seeing his precinct rebuilding Plan through? Does one really need to be Chairman of the RNC to get something like this done? In fact, considering the recent depressing displays of fecklessness, blindness and incompetence (i.e. NY20, Specter) from the official GOP establishment and its various arms, perhaps Blackwell not having to balance the interests of the rank-and-file against the narrow interests and warped conventional wisdom of Beltway Republicans, which (he would have had to as RNC Chairman) is a blessing in disguise.

With this, let me (re-)introduce an idea I only just touched on a few weeks ago; The Committeeman Project.

A Precinct Committeeman (AKA “Precinct Delegate” (MI), “Precinct Executive” (OH), etc.) is the party officer usually elected by party members in a precinct to be the party’s representative at the precinct level - it is the lowest rung of the ladder in both the major parties’ official leadership hierarchy. A Precinct Committeeman is supposed to help the party canvass how voters in his/her precinct perceive the issues/candidates, recruit campaign volunteers for GOTV and other activities, organize literature drops, promote party events and generally find where the votes are and encourage them to show up at the polls. In a number of states, Precinct Committeemen (e.g. IL) are automatically deputized as voter registrars and also as poll watchers.

Revitalizing the GOP’s precinct-level organization and bringing it into the 21st Century world of Web 2.0, social networking and multimedia are the principal aims of The Committeeman Project - essentially the Blackwell Plan as applied specifically to the need to ensure that every single precinct in the United States has a Republican Precinct Committeeman armed with modern web-based and/or stand-alone party-building tools at his/her fingertips and serving as a key nodal point in what it is hoped will grow into one massive constantly on and self-organizing e-community.

The Committeeman Project has two parts;

1. Recruitment: Some questions need to be answered first.
   How many precincts/county/state? e.g. PA|Knox County (451).
   How many precincts have currently serving precinct committeemen? Which ones are vacant?
   How does one set about becoming a precinct committeeman in a particular county/district?
   … etc.
2. Applications Development: I must first of all note that Ron Robinson and his GOPguerrillas Ning group are doing yeoman’s work in getting a GOP activist ActionCenter up and running in time for 2010. My thinking is exactly along those lines. As mentioned above, the endpoint of the Committeeman Project is to have every single one of the GOP’s Committeemen, their network of volunteers and activists interconnected at the precinct, township, county, up to the state and national level. To that effect, all Precinct Committeemen would be expected to run websites loaded with locale-conscious (i.e. using ZIP code) “GOPgets” for canvassing, volunteer recruiting, GOTV, events organization, multimedia, etc. For example;
   • Events Calendar
   • Multimedia (i.e. YouTube, LiveLeak) Channels
   • My Representatives
   • Candidates/Issues
   • Donate/Contribute
   • Volunteer
   • … etc.

From the (admittedly anecdotal) information I’ve gathered in the course of writing this, only about 40% to 50% (80-100,000) of Republican precinct committeeman seats are filled at any one time. Considering that there are 203,000 precincts spread across all the 3141 counties and the 57 50 states (and Territories) it means that up to 60% of the nation’s precincts have no official Republican point of presence. This is something that needs to be rectified.

But why, one might ask, the focus on lowly bottom of the totem pole Precinct Committeemen?

First of all, it should be noted that its not just Committeemen The Committeeman Project is out to recruit and equip. Similar party building tools (i.e. taskbars, modules, plugins, “widGOPgets“) will also be developed for neighborhood activists, volunteers, friendly bloggers, students, etc. all interconnected on a (hopefully) location-by-location basis with the Committeeman network and the rest of the Republican Party online - all of which, it should be noted, from the state party websites for the 50 states to the 3141 county websites, may need to be tweaked somewhat in light of foregoing events.

And second? Well … because the Precinct Committeeman is the “most powerful office in the world.”

Of course, that’s overstating matters a bit … but not entirely. Precinct Committeemen constitute the membership of their party’s County/Township Central Committees, from among whom they elect the members of the party’s County/Township Executive Committees (in most cases including the Chairmen and other leadership positions). In some locales (e.g. Arizona?), serving as a Precinct Committeeman is an eligibility prerequisite for any higher party office. The key thing though, is this; these local party Committees (whether Central, Executive or both) can and regularly do issue Primary endorsements - and this gets recorded on the sample ballot/voter guide the primary voter carries into the booth. And more than 90% of the time, because he/she gets the endorsing tick mark on the sample ballot, the endorsee wins.

Which means that, at the level where it most matters, these “lowly” bottom-rung party-men control who gets to appear on the November General Election ballot with the ‘R’ (or ‘D’) behind his name. What this means is that while millions of men and women voted in the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries that resulted in John McCain emerging as the GOP’s standard bearer, it was first decided in plain sight but under the radar by a nationwide group of only about 80,000-100,000 men and women. And that’s just the Presidency - one office out of the approximately 513,000 public/elected offices in the United States, from the 50 Governors, members of Congress and the State Legislatures, on down to city/town mayors, county sheriffs and members of the local school board.

Another impressive thing about the Blackwell Plan was the very non-Beltway like recognition that if the party is to ever find its way back to the Majority, it needs to regain the confidence of the party rank and file. In fact, of the five elements it identified as necessary for a “resurgence”, the first it listed is an “Inspired Base.” Which sort of answers the question as to why John McCain didn’t have armies of volunteers cascading through the precincts and knocking on doors on his behalf. Were it not for the woman he picked to be his Vice-President, he would have approached Election Day broke, still unable to fill a hotel conference room and on his way to a humiliating 40+ state rout. So if anything, 2008 should lay to rest the notion that one can ignore the base in favor of appealing to some nebulous “bipartisan”/”Independent” subset of the electorate; on the contrary, 2008 (and 2006) emphatically brought it home that one must thread the needle of appealing to both one’s party base and swing voters at the same time.

Regaining the confidence of the Republican base starts first of all by getting the right names on the general election ballot - we cannot continue to defer to the same shortsighted consultant-based calculationism and Beltway conventional wisdom that has brought the Republican Party to its current state. It’s the same mindset that saw the GOP waste valuable resources (not to mention its credibility) in support of Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey in 2004 and propose to do the same again in 2010 until Specter himself made it a moot point, the same mindset that turned out Democrats to vote in the Republican Primary in support of Lincoln Chafee over Steve Laffey in 2006.

As Scott Rasmussen has recently observed, there now exists a very large, very dangerous disconnect between the establishment Republicans (especially those in DC) and the GOP rank and file. This actually stands on its head Ronald Reagan’s morale-boosting observation in his famous “bold colors” speech at CPAC in 1975 - back then, polls at both parties’ most recent national convention revealed that elected Republicans and Republicans in the rank and file were mostly on the same page on all the major issues, unlike the Democrats. Reagan cited this as a sign of better times to come even after the carnage of 1974 … and as it turned out, he was right.

No such similar situation exists today, and as Rasmussen starkly put it;

To be relevant in politics, you need either formal power or a lot of people willing to follow your lead. The governing Republicans in the nation’s capital have lost both on their continuing path to irrelevance.

In hindsight, the most politically profound thing that happened in the aftermath of 2004 was the election of base-favorite Howard “I hate Republicans and everything Republicans stand for!” Dean to head up the DNC. It wasn’t so much that it was a good choice (and no one thought so at the time), but what it signified; that the Democratic establishment in DC had been forcefully brought to heel by its activist rank and file. It was no longer a top-down relationship. As Eli Pariser(?) of MoveOn crowed; “We bought it, we own it.” To prove it further, four years later, the rank and file wanted Barack Obama for President, the establishment wanted Hillary Clinton; and now the establishment’s choice serves at the pleasure of the other. In comparison, when loyal Republicans complained of open primaries in liberal states giving us a Presidential candidate who actually took pride in how often (and for no valid explainable reason) he’d stuck his finger into the collective eyes of the very same people he would need to carry him over the finish line, we were essentially told to “shut up and get in line!”

The Committeeman Project is designed to force a similar and long overdue re-alignment of the Republican elected class away from the liberal Beltway and state capitol punditocracy and back to the people who elected them. I would imagine that knowing that there are people, organized 24/7, who can make sure you don’t even make it to the starting gate watching you, communicating with each other (and the voters in your district), would do wonders for improving one’s ability to remember promises and listen to one’s constituents.

Of course, the Committeeman Project would only be successful only in so far as the people it recruits meet the same high standards they’ll be in charge of safeguarding in the GOP’s elected officials. To quote the Reagan era aphorism; personnel is policy and it always starts with the leadership. Fact; every serious project needs a project leader to ride herd and get things done. I don’t believe the Committeeman Project is any different, and in my opinion, the ideal person to head up the Committeeman Project would be Ken Blackwell, (currently Vice-Chairman of the RNC’s Platform Committee). Not only is he a bona fide grassroots conservative, he’s a proven leader with an admirable record of stepping on establishment toes even at a cost to his own political future, and actually a phenomenally strong fundraiser - which is always a useful skill. But even more than that, the Committeeman Project is actually his idea - basically no different from what he had planned to do as Chairman of the RNC.

Adam Graham over at PJM put it well;

Because of the Republican Party’s lack of interest in the ideas that brought passion and energy to the party’s base, many activists began to step away, give less money, not volunteer, and stay home on election day … The greatest danger to a GOP resurgence is not those folks who are motivated to political actions by their beliefs, but rather the way-too-powerful [go along to get along] good old boys who stalk the halls of Congress and statehouses across America.

The only way back to a lasting effective Majority is for the GOP elected class to listen to its base, take heed and return to its principles in the corridors of power in DC, the state capitals and city hall. And the best way to ensure that happens is to make the threat of losing office and being replaced by an angry rank and file real.

The second thing is that, like it or not, the Obama Campaign, much like the McKinley campaign in 1896, broke new ground in 2008. From here on in, a technologically interconnected and grassroots-powered campaign infrastructure is going to be increasingly a staple part of all future successful political campaigns beyond the most local of levels. And the fact is that we cannot hope to compete against the Democrats in this new environment with a dispirited base constantly forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.

I think the Committeeman Project, at very least, begins to address these issues in empowering the Party rank and file over the elected class, and providing the beginning of the needed infrastructure to bring about a GOP resurgence sooner rather than later.

As usual, all criticisms, additions, corrections, etc. welcome.

As you may know a bunch of redneck traitors are planning a protest on April 15th involving waving around a few tea bags and demonstrating mild irritation at Prez. Obama for making them pay taxes. Here is your chance to do your duty for your president and country and send these fools an unmistakable message.

First of all you can sign up at Huffington Post to become a tea party reporter. It would be a good idea to meet some people to take names and also pictures if possible which should also be forwarded to Janet Napolitano at the DHS.

Next you can join with our comrades at ACORN who have plans afoot to disperse these traitors.

Basically the plan works like this - ACORN has infiltrated the redneck groups that are planning all this. On the 15th at the proper moment a van pulls up with 5 young black women with pro Obama signs. They will be peaceful and respectful. Our infiltrators will verbally attack them with profanity and racial slurs and physically push them around while our camera crew films. In a minute they take off and it is all over.

Doesn’t seem like much till that night when the video gets put on the news and all you see are crazy hillbilly conservatives attacking innocent black counter protesters, shouting racial slurs and pushing them around.

You too can be a part of the glorious moment in history and help keep these traitors in check.

So be careful out there.

And most importantly, don’t forget to have fun.

All over the blogosphere, the Left went nuts with joy; and remarkably echo-chamber like talking points “See? See?!” they shrieked in smug elation “The GOP is filled with nothing but racists! Racists!! YAAAAYYYY!!!!”

As for me, my first thought was that this was far more likely to be a Democratic dirty trick. As far as I’m concerned, only a Democrat would believe that such a sentiment on a campaign pin would draw appreciative laughs from a Republican audience, so I looked for any story about this vendor - his name is Jonathan Alcox - that would also spare a few a lines to shed some light on his partisan affiliation, donation records, etc.

No such luck - for some reason, no one in the media thought to check up on that.

What I did discover though was that he was something of an equal-opportunity offender i.e. he makes political pins, stickers and buttons for sale to both Republicans and Democrats at their conventions. This was the button he sold at the TXGOP convention that got him into the news. The one on top is the one that got him and the TXGOP as collateral damage in the news. The one at the bottom is one he made to sell at the TX Democratic convention.

The kicker is this though - on the “Obama button” at the TXGOP convention;

“I only made 12 buttons to test them out … And, I only sold four. Two were sold to journalists who were looking for a controversial story to bring out of the convention.”

On the Bush-Chimpanzee button at the TX Democratic convention;

“… they sold out almost immediately.”

Ask yourselves, which one better reflects the mindset of its target market? And how come only one of these buttons made the news?

The jury is still out on whether or not Alcox was a plant by the other side (I think he was) - the TXGOP is not taking any chances though; Alcox has been banned from all future TXGOP conventions and the national conventions till further notice (i.e. forever).

But the issue of the Left trying to sabotage Republican/Conservative gatherings is not something that the jury is still out on - it is a fact. Online, we’ve seen co-ordinated trolling, mobying and astroturfing campaigns; people signing up, claiming to be Republicans/Conservatives and then posting racist comments in diaries in order to tar their targets. It only makes sense that they would take it offline.

April 15th (National Tea Party Day) is no exception.

Jeff Poor at Newsbusters reports;

On Fox News Channel’s April 7 “Your World,” host Neil Cavuto reported that the Tax Day tea party protests on April 15 will be “infiltrated” by their political opponents and led by left-wing activist organizations. He specifically named Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

“Only eight days before a nationwide tea party, some over-caffeinated crashers aiming to lay waste to it,” Cavuto said. “Reports of very well-organized infiltrators trying to mix in and rain on this parade. Talk about taxing.”

What bothers me is that the two organizers (Chicago and Sacramento) Cavuto interviewed in that news segment seem to be a bit naive about the aim of Huffington Post’s project to have signed-up “Citizen Journalists” go in and report on the various Tea Parties being held across the country. They seem to think that ACORN’s activists would be wearing their ACORN T-shirts (made with your tax money, BTW) and waving their oath to Obama placards. They seem to think the MSM - which has done its level best to ignore the Tea Party movement - are interested in reporting anything that would raise any difficult questions for their man god in the White House.

So, for all the people planning to attend a Tea Party, keep an eye out for people holding Confederate flags, “Kill Barack”, “God Hates Fags” signs, and other such questionable items and paraphernalia. Keep an ear open for idiots loudly screaming nonsense (racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic rants) they “think” Conservatives actually believe. Note that they would naturally head towards the TV cameras, partly to join their fellow Obama-worshipping “counter-protestors” (even while pretending to be Conservatives, Leftists can’t seem to shake their strong herding instinct) but primarily so they can make it into the news broadcasts later on that night.

Which is, of course, the point of it all. They want Tea Party organizers answering more awkward questions about the supposed racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. of their attendees than talking about Barack Obama’s boneheaded economic and fiscal policies - rather like how the TXGOP convention organizers at the end of it found themselves having to answer awkward questions about racist campaign pins they had nothing to do with.

So the aim is to make the Tea Party movement to look like a nationwide Klan rally of fringe kooks and troglodytes. And if there are no kluckers, kooks and troglodytes, then by Godaia, they would provide the kluckers, kooks and troglodytes themselves - after all, they know what we’re really like deep down inside. Like Lewis Lapham already writing and submitting an article panning Bush’s Speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention before it even happened, the folks at HuffPo have already written their story, what they’re waiting for are the embellishments to be provided by their agents on the field.

Once it’s on HuffPo, it would find its way into the MSM - as a huge number of MSM stories often do.

So consider following these agents provocateurs around around with signs with arrows pointing at them and “ACORN Fraud” boldly written on them. Consider carrying your own camera to record the people being interviewed by TV news reporters. Record yourselves and take pictures talking to other good-faith attendees. Record the speeches and post it up on YouTube to foil MSM and Lefty blogger creative editing (AKA Ransom Note Method). And just for kicks, sign up to the HuffPo’s “Citizen JournaFabulist” program and include “#huff” in your Twitter messages if you’ll be tweeting the event.

More links, details and suggestions nicely collated here. (Temple of Mut) as well as in Roger Simon’s comments section.

I responded thus;

Yep … Christie wasn’t as smart as those Democrat DOJ staffers that went after Stevens.

Those guys not only prosecuted Stevens in DC, where a Republican is about as likely to escape conviction as a snowball escaping hell in solid form, they leaked slanted info to the AK Press, they also hid exculpatory evidence at trial, and managed to win a conviction right on time for November.

Those guys were pros.

That was yesterday.

Today, totally coincidentally, the papers are saying this;

The Justice Department has moved to dismiss former Sen. Ted Stevens’ indictment, effectively voiding his Oct. 27 conviction on seven counts of filing false statements on his U.S. Senate financial disclosure forms.

“After careful review, I have concluded that certain information should have been provided to the defense for use at trial,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement released this morning. “In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial.”

The Justice Department filed its motion to dismiss the case this morning.

A lot of things bothered me about the Stevens trial - and I won’t claim that I expressed them when it mattered. I do remember that Art (Achance to the newbies) did. One, the fact that it was launched during campaign season, and as the Wall Street Journal last month noted when the prosecution team’s misconduct began to surface; ” Justice rules forbid issuing indictments too close to elections.”

The second thing that bothered me was the numerous highly damaging leaks that could only have come from the prosecution alleging all sorts of misdeeds and quid pro quo transactions that ended up on the front pages of Alaska’s newspapers and in headlines outside Alaska’s borders. Art complained over and over again that Stevens was not even indicted for any of the things he was being condemned for as being obviously guilty of. Again, the WSJ notes; “Though Mr. Stevens was a champion earmarker, the government never alleged much less proved that Veco got anything in return from the Senator.”

Another thing that bothered me was the fact that the trial was held before a DC jury. For those who don’t know or were not paying attention during the farce that was the Scooter Libby trial for perjury - where the man ended up being convicted for outing supposedly the CIA’s most super-duper double code-word top-secret agent - DC is extremely Democratic and the people likely to be willing to serve on any DC federal jury are often extremely political and partisan. I firmly believe that today, the likelihood of a Republican escaping conviction for any crime in front of a DC jury is about as much as the aforementioned snowball escaping hell in solid form.

And to highlight another parallel to the Scooter Libby farce, after all the innuendo and allegations of high end big money corruption, Stevens was indicted on charges of perjury - what the WSJ describes as “lying on forms.” i.e. his Senate financial disclosure forms.

Now let’s examine what happened here.

Not only did these prosecutors seek and issue indictments just a few short months before Election Day, not only did they engage in the strategic leaking of what amounted to no more than innuendo and outright libel/slander against the Senator to friendly reporters, not only did they hold the trial before a DC jury (which may not be their doing) as the Presidential campaign got into high gear, they also “forgot” to share documents with the defense, prevented exculpatory witness testimony from being heard in open court, and when it came to the documents they did share with the defense they actually redacted exculpatory passages from witness transcripts.

To give you all an example of what somehow never made it to Stevens’ defense team; after the renovation work done on his house, Stevens wrote to Bill Allen, CEO of VECO and the prosecution’s star witness, asking him to talk to Stevens’ neighbor (who had overseen the renovation on Stevens’ behalf) about the bill or invoice for the work for Stevens to pay back. As Stevens wrote; “You owe me a bill … Remember Torricelli, my friend. Friendship is one thing, compliance with the ethics rules entirely different.”

Now according to Bill Allen sitting in the witness box, Bob Persons (the neighbor) told him when he went to talk to him about the bill; “Don’t worry about getting a bill, Ted’s just covering his ass.”

Which sounds condemning until you find out that Bill Allen had told prosecutors some months earlier (when his memory should have been a bit fresher) that he could not recall ever meeting Bob Persons about providing a bill to Ted Stevens. Add in the fact that it’s not in dispute that Stevens paid every bill that was presented to him - over $180,000 out of his own pocket. This and more potentially exculpatory information were in the interview notes that the prosecution somehow “forgot” to provide to the defense.

So it is no surprise that the trial judge found the prosecution team in contempt in February for their continued failure to provide these documents unredacted, undoctored, to the defense for the sentencing phase. The DOJ had to assign another DOJ lawyer to review their case files and send the documents to the defense. These would be including those documents relating to complaints by the FBI agent in charge of the investigation about prosecutors covering up evidence unhelpful to their case and trying to prevent a witness from testifying because his/her testimony would have harmed their case.

Ted Stevens may have been a pork-addicted fiend. He may have made a mockery of fiscal restraint as a principle of Republican politics, and he has rightly been pilloried for it over the years. But it’s obvious he was no crook if prosecutors had to go to such dishonest lengths to get him convicted - and by a DC jury during a Presidential campaign with partisan passions running high.

Now, maybe I’m going dangerously close to conspiracy theory territory here, but looking at everything, the timing of the indictment and trial (finishing about a week to election day), the leaks, the trial venue (almost guaranteed to return a conviction), the deliberate withholding/doctoring of evidence by the prosecution, the fact that the lead prosecutor is a registered Democrat with ambitions of being appointed the US Attorney for Boston … and I’m starting to think this was more of a political operation than anything to do with justice.

That’s one.

The second thing is that I have to note that Achance, again, was right. Republicans, in a bid to appear as white as the driven snow, have been tricked, again and again, into committing fratricide. For all that Obama can give the world lessons in throwing people under the bus once they become inconvenient, Republicans are hardly slouches. All it takes is an accusation, a news headline and the entire concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is thrown out the window in a rush to condemn and disassociate (as if the MSM would ever forget to attach the big scarlet ‘R’).

Nothing p*ssed me off more than seeing Democrats and their pet talking heads condemning Republicans for attempting to change their Caucus rules to enable Tom DeLay (another victim of prosecutorial misconduct - whatever happened to his trial anyway?) stay on as Leader while he fought his indictment by a clearly dishonest and partisan Ronnie Earle. And there were Republicans who got on TV and print to echo them -e.g. Chris Shays. This while Democrats have no such rule in place for their leadership.

Simply put; we need to start defending our own. I’m not saying we should emulate the Democrats who had no problem with criminals like William Jefferson and Chris Dodd serving in their midst, but the fact that someone is on our side means we should give him/her the benefit of the doubt, extend them the courtesy of believing them innocent until proven guilty.

We condemned Stevens from the moment he was indicted, we believed the leaks, we joined the Democrats in labelling him corrupt - a quid pro quo player.

And we were wrong. He was one of our own. He deserved better.

A group of Alaska liberals, with the apparent cooperation of members of the Alaska Democratic Party have been filing ethics charge after ethics charge against Sarah Palin. The aim? Not to get her impeached and booted from office, because every single one of the charges are frivolous, baseless and even fairly deranged - one was even filed in the name of a soap opera character - but something far more personal.

These people want to bankrupt the Palins and leave them destitute. They want to empty their bank accounts so that they cannot afford the basics and necessities of life after Governor Palin leaves office.

With the exception of the partisan ethics complaint filed against Palin because her husband (a private citizen) made it clear (as was his right) that he didn’t think a policeman (now a hero to liberals) who used a taser on a ten year old child should continue to keep his gun and badge, all of these ethics charges were filed after John McCain tapped her to be his Vice-President.

David Bonoir, as the House Democratic Whip pioneered this tactic in the mid-1990s after the Gingrich Revolution swept Republicans to their first Majority in forty years. Immediately after Congress resumed, Bonoir began filing ethics complaints - frivolous, partisan complaints that even Democratic members of the ethics committee mostly laughed away - against Newt Gingrich on a weekly basis, week after week like clockwork and sending out press releases to friendly press outlets. It was a despicable tactic, but Republicans and Newt dismissed it as a desperate loser antic and ended up being blindsided when liberal talking heads began to use the talking point of Newt being the Speaker with the most ethics complaints filed against him … ever.

But at least, Bonoir’s aim was political, and politics ain’t beanbag, after all.

These people’s aim is most assuredly not political. Frivolous charge-filers Andree McLeod, Zane Henning, Linda Kellen Biegel, etc. are affiliated with a group of liberals (how many on the “Journolist”, I wonder?) who went to Palin’s hometown of Wasilla immediately after she was tapped for the VP spot and dubbed themselves the “Wasilla Project” with the sole purpose of ensuring any and all manner of slander, innuendo and libel against Palin was publicized on YouTube and from there would hopefully make it into the mainstream media. Henning (who claims to be a “conservative”) and McLeod (who is a “registered Republican”) feature prominently in their videos in “interviews” repeating the Alaska Democratic Party’s campaign talking points on Palin on cue.

McLeod, Henning, Biegel and others like them have discovered, however, that no matter how frivolous their charges, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how bone-headed stupid, the Governor would still have to legally defend herself against them - meaning she’ll have to pay attorney fees as she goes before the Personnel Board. And so they have gotten down to business, and like David Bonoir against Gingrich, they’ve been filing ethics complaint after ethics complaint against Governor Palin, but this time with her bankruptcy in mind.

Palin is now owing the law firm she has been forced to retain to answer this storm of ethics charges over half a million dollars since September - and note that her annual salary as Governor of Alaska is only $125,000 with Todd Palin making about $86,000 as both a fisherman and an oil worker - with more of these suits and ethics charges being promised by these bottom feeders and others like them.

After bearing with these attacks, Palin finally let the situation be known when she filed her annual financial disclosure forms with the Alaska Public Offices Commission this week, writing to the Anchorage Daily News;

I must defend against these baseless ethics accusations out of my own pocket as the use of public monies to do so could itself violate state law …

… obviously we cannot afford to personally pay these bills - and really no future governor should feel the sense of financial vulnerability at the hands of those with a political vendetta bent on personal destruction …

Some have suggested a legal fund to pay these bills. We’ll have to pursue that.

And if she does pursue that, I doubt she’d have any problem paying off any legal fees for the next twenty years.

But it’s the fact that she has to consider doing this to keep her and her husband’s life savings - a man and woman with minor children at home - from disappearing altogether that should sicken all of us - I don’t know about any of you, but I’m literally shaking with rage here.

This is the politics of personal destruction at its most reprehensible … and these people need to have their names made public and turned to mud in Alaska and all over America. They need to have themselves mired in court and forced to pay hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in attorney’s fees defending themselves against charges of depriving the people of Alaska of the services of their governor because of nothing more than hate.

I knew the Left’s tactics were ugly, but this … this is beyond wrong, this is pure evil.

H/T: Jim Geraghty (CampaignSpot), Videmus Omnia (Conservatives4Palin) …

A friend of mine in the Army explained to me once, why the bulk of servicemen from the top officers to the lowest enlisteds are against the allowing of open homosexuality in the Armed Forces. Primarily, it was unit cohesion, and he gave me an explanation, that I thought made sense.

Unit cohesion depends upon members of a unit trusting each other with their lives - no favoritism, no hesitation. Sex brings all of these things back (and heavily) into the equation. This is the reason why allowing gay men to serve in the Armed Forces is not in any way related to desegregation - there is no equivalence (of military import) between them.

There is a reason why brothers and other close relatives are not allowed to serve in the same unit where they can conceivably fall under the same command line - and where one may possibly command the other directly.

The Armed Forces do their best to avoid such situations not just because they want to avoid “Saving Private Ryan” type situations but also because they want to avoid having situations where one brother has to, for the sake of the mission or the lives of other members of the unit, command his brother (because of a specialty in his training) to do something that would almost certainly mean he gets injured badly, or even his death.

The psychological impact of giving an order and a man of yours dying or being maimed in order to carry it out is not something many outside the military (and rescue services) can contemplate - the guilt, second-guessing, the self-recrimination, can destroy all on its own.

Now imagine if that man was your brother.

Allowing open homosexuality into the Armed Forces presents the same issues. One single gay man in a unit may not be much of a problem - it’s entirely possible (if difficult to imagine) that his unit mates would not really care that he prefers men to women as sex partners.

It’s when you have two or more gay men in a unit that you may have a problem. Fighting units live in close quarters with each other, and their members are at the peak of fitness and I would assume, attractiveness. It’s the same problem that presents itself with putting women in combat units.

How do you stop relationships from forming? L/CPL A and Private B competing for the affections of Private C to the detriment of the rest of the unit that will almost certainly be aware of it? Note that A, B and C could be any combination of genders. Private C could be a woman or a man.

Imagine the battlefield again, CPL A has to order his lover, Private C, the specialist in X, to go do X. If X is not done, the platoon is not going to make it without suffering heavy casualties. But the person doing X, while saving the rest of his/her unit and helping them achieve their objective, is not likely to make it back.

So the Armed Forces are back to square one. Avoiding putting brothers in the same units is fairly easy. Limiting the mixing of men and women in order to prevent the formation of complicating relationships is harder, as the Navy has discovered with the phenomenon of female sailors falling pregnant while at sea. Three guesses who’s impregnating them - civilian tag-alongs (i.e. NCIS), aliens or their male fellow sailors?

Now we’re asking them to find a way to ensure that gay servicemen are distributed enough to minimize the risks of sexual relationships forming between members of the same unit.

Somehow, I don’t think this is likely to end well.

The floor is open for discussion.

Who is your GOP precinct committeeman? Your GOP county chairman? Your county’s representative(s) on the state’s central committee? What if you’re looking for any local upcoming Republican Party events in your county or district? What if you want to host one such event yourself? What if you want to organize with other Republicans in your locale in support of a reform-minded conservative Republican running for a seat on the local school board, city council or to fill a state legislative seat? How do you go about making where you live, if already friendly to Republicans, even friendlier, and if hostile, less so?

Off the top of my head, I would suggest having a ZIP code module on the front page of gop.com. You enter your ZIP code and it gives you a list of upcoming events within this many miles, your local (precinct, township, county, district, state, federal) elected and party officials, vacancies in the party structure, upcoming races/elections (no matter how small the office), candidates and their donate buttons, snippets of local news, lists of local (friendly) bloggers, links to relevant party and candidate websites, etc. Checking the “Remember My Locale” box means that every time you visit, the front page would reflect your set locale.

And, quite part from redesigning gop.com, we should have developers coming up with widgets (I’d call them “gopgets”) that Right-leaning blogs and websites can place in their sidebars. We should have RSS feeds (including dedicated internet video/radio channels) and “gopgets” developed for people to install as their default google-type desktops. I would imagine allowing the user to specify his/her ZIP code in the settings would help localize content and create a sort of “e-universe.” The aim is to make it as easy as possible for Republicans to participate, to interact, to self-organize, to stay/be informed, to donate, to communicate with their local and national leadership and elected officials.

My real beef against Michael Steele is not his recent propensity for gaffes that require painful explanations and embarrassing apologies the next day, it is the fact that he was once a state party Chair and therefore I expected him to hit the ground running with goals in mind and specific programs to achieve these goals ready to launch on day one. So far, I’ve heard and seen nothing except for the man inserting both feet into his mouth every time he’s faced with a microphone and television camera.

For example, the GOP needs its own version of the so-called “50 State Strategy” so that we can start being competitive in Blue States the way the Democrats are in Red States. Katon Dawson at least had something of a plan along those lines with his “Project 3141” (strengthening the party in all 3141 counties in the United States). Blackwell chose to focus on investing in precinct level organization with GOTV and task management technology thrown in. In other words, get local. What is Steele’s plan?

Allow me therefore to make a suggestion to our Chairman - with a hat tip to Mr. Brian Hibbert.

It should be a principle issue for the GOP to fill the hundreds, if not many thousands, of party organization positions that are today empty at the ward, borough, precinct, township, district and county levels. At the minimum, the Republican National Committee should secure solid commitments from every one of the state parties to ensure that no county precinct, no matter how heavily Democratic, is without a Committeeman. Failing that, the RNC should undertake its own program to ensure that these seats are filled.

One of the reasons I became excited about Ken Blackwell’s candidacy for RNC Chairman (and so very disappointed that he apparently never stood a chance in the first place - which, I suspect, means that no one outside of his supporters in the 168 actually read his “Conservative Resurgence Plan“) is the amount of attention his plan devoted to getting organized at the precinct level;

The highest emphasis must be put on precinct level organization. If we are organized at the precinct level, our organizations at other levels will be much more efficient and productive.

The Blackwell Plan specifically called for the recruitment of a “new generation of precinct leaders and block captains …” These “Precinct Organizers” and their delegated “Street Captains” would have access to a set of (online) database, mapping, management and task tracking applications to enable them plan and direct their on-ground activities and resources in their areas of responsibility from well before people go to the polls to cast their votes.

My thoughts upon reading this boiled down to three;

1. It’s exactly what the doctor ordered - for a party that purports to espouse federalism, the Republican Party has paid far too little attention to local and state level politics over the past eight years, and in the end, it has hurt us badly at both the local and national levels. Bringing the focus down and empowering the party structure at the precinct level hopefully flips things back to their proper order. Being strong at the precinct level means being strong at the county level, the district level, state level, and ultimately, the federal level.
2. The Democratic Party is in the fortuitous position of being able to outsource the bulk of its GOTV and party building legwork to the unions and an allied plethora of Left-Wing “non-profit” front groups (usually funded with taxpayer money) - ACORN being just one of them. This lays an architecture upon which just as large (or as effective) a ground-force to compete can be easily spun up, activated and organized in the weeks and even days before an election.
3. There’s no need to create another infrastructure when one already exists. I believe the GOP should leverage on the precinct and county leadership structure that is already in place (and supplement where necessary) and task these offices with playing a significantly more active role in rebuilding the party and also serve as the linchpins in forging closer ties between the leadership and the rank and file.

One thing that we all need to remember is that technology is ultimately nothing more than a tool - an F-22 is no more harmful than a paper plane without a pilot to get it off the ground and press the trigger on its canons. So we can have all the latest innovations in party management applications and software, which is very important, but without the army to use them and the dedication to standing up that army, all that development work doesn’t really matter.

But with the people in place, and technology (the aforemention “gopgets“) targeted toward enabling the party structure share information, manage resources, coordinate their activities and identify targets to be met, the GOP’s committeemen and other local level activists can be harnessed into one powerful, “always on“, self-organizing “GOPe-universe” that would be far more than the sum total of its parts.

As it stands now, the typical precinct committeeman does little more than the occasional literature drop, attend meetings for leadership votes and get lobbied for endorsements. This needs to change. Under this plan, every single committeeman must maintain an active website armed with special widgets (”gopgets …?”) and RSS feeds for candidate profiling, organizing/popularizing events, fundraising, volunteer recruitment, voter canvassing and registration (note that in many locales, precinct committeemen are also deputized as voter registrars), etc.

Committeemen not prepared (or able) to meet up with the new requirements (an added bonus is that this would almost certainly shine a revelatory spotlight on the frauds - i.e. Democrat infiltrators - like the so-called “life-long Republican” exposed by Kansas Meadowlark here) would have challengers recruited and contingency measures built into the e-platform would be taken in the interim before they are successfully escorted out the door.

In the words of Gamecock, more on this and the “GOPe-universe” later …

Either way, it’s stuff like this I expect Steele and his team to be coming up with on a daily basis, tweaking, improving, implementing and even discarding as the situation and feasibility demands, not seeing our Chairman going on liberal TV shows where some smug smirking numbskull likens the Republican Party to the Nazis and watching said Chairman … let it slide.

The main disadvantage of being a politics junkie interacting so often with other politics junkies is that you tend to forget that you’re far from the typical voter.

It’s not so much what Rush says, or the fact that he’s what the media and their menagerie of tame “Republicans” like David Brooks consider “controversial.” To me, those are all positives, especially when you add the fact that, unlike Bush, he bites back.

But ultimately the issue here is tactics and strategy. Rush hitting back, daring Barack Obama to debate him, taking Michael Steele to the woodshed, defending his “failure” comments, etc. is all well and good. Except that he’s doing it only on his show. Which, I suspect, is exactly what Rahm Emanuel and the rest of his crew were counting on.

It’s a matter or simple electoral math and applying what we all know about the general American electorate.

Let’s be clear here; Emanuel and Co. are not afraid or particularly concerned about Rush’s 22 million listeners. They’ve written them off as unwinnable and have factored that into their calculations. Which leads us to real targets of the anti-Rush campaign; the mushy middle - election deciders - who don’t listen to talk radio, and who get their news from the three networks and by skimming the headlines at the check-out counter - their numbers are much much higher.

And what these people are seeing now on their television screens are a parade of Democrats and neutered 5th Column “Republicans” shaking their heads and tsking at Rush’s comments, and anchors/hosts accepting from the onset that Limbaugh is hateful, angry, extreme, and hoping for the nation to collapse for political gain. And that by extension, so is the Republican Party he’s associated with.

For us to assume that this would redound to our advantage means that we’re expecting Independents - the unfortunately abysmally ignorant who unfortunately decide elections - to actually take the time to tune in to listen for themselves when we know, through bitter experience over the last eight years, that this is the last segment of the electorate that will actively go out of its way to seek knowledge beyond what is fed to them by the DNC’s agents in the Press Corps. So why are we expecting any different now?

So this is my advice to Rush; don’t just preach to the choir. Get out from behind the Golden Microphone.

To be more specific; on your show over the next few days call up the producers of the various Sunday Morning Talk Shows on the Big Three, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC, live on air, and offer to come unto their shows to debate anyone they want, or whoever the White House sends up. Right now, you’re the big story - they’re talking about you all the time. So they can’t legitimately say you’re not a prime time “get.”

Like I said, Emanuel and Co. are not bothered much by Limbaugh’s radio show and his 22 million listeners - they consider talk radio and the people who tune in to be “fringe.” But Limbaugh appearing on what they consider “respectable” (meaning liberal) media, unfiltered? Where the uncommitted get the bulk of their news?

That’ll keep them up at night.

Dubya allowed himself to be destroyed by his refusal to engage his opponents and use his bully pulpit to set the record straight. And through sheer relentless unchallenged repetition in the Press, the Democrats and their 4th Estate allies were able to sell “Bush Lied” and other damaging stories to the American people. Now they’re trying to do the same thing to Rush Limbaugh.

And they can succeed despite Limbaugh’s lack of a similar reticence to fight back. Because, ultimately, there is no difference between silence and speaking where no one can hear you - and as far as I’m concerned, preaching to the choir falls neatly under the second category.

A rule in business is that you either grow or you die - and we can’t grow if we refuse to compete in Blue districts and states. Yet this is what out latte-sipping, pencil-pushing army of consultants continue to suggest we do.

An example of this type of thinking is amply demonstrated by this post here. Note that I’m not calling this person out and I mean no disrespect, but nonetheless I feel I have to take the time to show just how utterly boneheaded this sort of thinking is, and how important it is to purge it from the GOP before it does any more damage.

According to the logic of this post, Senator David Vitter (who has been an excellent Senator by all accounts) is “damaged” because of the DC Madam Scandal - and therefore Rep. Ahn Joseph Cao (LA-2) should be put up by the party to Primary challenge him because there is no chance Cao would be able to keep his LA-2 seat (in which 70% of registered voters are Democrats) in 2010 - and we need to “save him” (i.e. Cao) from “certain destruction.”

The first thing to note about this “logic” is how eerily familiar it is to every single Republican who has watched in horrified fascination as Republicans have abandoned colleagues under fire (whether they be Presidential nominees or elected officials) when loyalty, and speaking up, was what was called for. Let me be clear here, it is cowardice, it is wrong, it is stupidity, and worst of all, it gives Democrats and their media organs veto power over the narrative without them even lifting a finger. So the @#%! what if a pornstar is going to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary? Is it that no one thinks that Vitter can’t point it out as a Democratic dirty trick?

Barack Obama is probably President today precisely because of the incandescent stupidity of the ILGOP in abandoning Jack Ryan when his child-custody records were unsealed by a Democrat judge against *both* his and his ex-wife’s wishes thanks to the Chicago Tribune and the local ABC affiliate working in tandem with the Obama Senate campaign in 2004. Instead of opening fire on the Chicago Tribune and ABC for a horrible violation of privacy affecting a minor child that neither the Tribune nor ABC would have tolerated if it were directed at a Democrat, (ILGOP Chairwoman) Judy Baar Topinka and her “moderate” friends aimed their guns at Ryan and pulled the trigger.

We’re now being asked to consider doing the same thing, based on similar “logic” to David Vitter. No. A thousand times no. The man came clean to his wife, and his priest and started attending counselling to save his marriage and himself long before this became public, long before he was elected to the Senate in 2004. The GOP not only would be losing a brilliant and loyal Republican in the Senate (a Rhodes scholar graduate of both Harvard and Oxford - the very first Republican to be elected to the Senate from Louisiana since Reconstruction), but we’d also be confirming two things; [1] loyalty is not part of the Republican make-up and [2] we’re the intolerant holier-than-thou Pharisees liberals have been claiming us to be for the past three decades.

And as for Cao, if the GOP were serious, Cao would be used as a test case in developing electoral strategies for Republicans to not just win, but hold Blue seats, especially the majority minority districts around the country that we need to start becoming competitive in.

Here’s an idea for anyone who can get this across to Cao’s Chief of Staff; take a leaf from Strom Thurmond’s book.

Sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it, especially considering that Cao represents a majority-black district, right? A lot of people are familiar with Thurmond’s past as a segregationist (thanks to the Press constantly reminding us of it - which they pointedly *don’t* do when it comes to ex-KKK Kleagle Robert Byrd’s own equally as odious past), but most are not aware of the fact that no-one, absolutely no-one in Congress during his time and since then was more dedicated to delivering constituent services than Thurmond - so much so that the South Carolina Conference of Black Mayors honored him with an award in 1983, less than two decades since his legendary 24 hour filibuster of the Civil Rights Acts.

Here’s another thing most people don’t know. Up until his last campaign, no Republican in the South got higher percentages of the black vote than Strom Thurmond. There’s a reason for that - yes, constituent services. For many years, his office sent congratulatory letters to every South Carolina High School graduate (of every race and creed) and he personally called families that had just had a new arrival to congratulate them on the birth of his new constituent.

It really doesn’t require a genius to figure this sort of thing out. All this talk of new technology and new media and using it to win elections will get us nowhere if all we have is the technology and no clear idea of how to apply it.

Cao should become the most responsive, most interactive, most constituent service-driven politician in Congress. He should be holding townhall meetings (both online and offline) every quarter to tell his constituents what he’s up to and explain why he voted this way or that way. He should have young volunteers going around the district with questionnaires every month about their concerns. His office should be sending letters to the editor and op-eds to local papers in the district on a regular basis. He should be hosting online forums on his official House website and any campaign sites he might have. He should be talking to radio, especially black radio in the district, and uploading updates, his views on current affairs in Washington and his district, and video endorsements from ordinary citizens of his district on YouTube on a weekly basis.

Look, half the battle is showing up. Cao showed up at least, and opportunity knocked - good for him and thank you, Mr. Jefferson. But remember, that’s still just half the battle. Now it’s time for him and the Republican Party to fight, to fight for the seat. For the GOP to just give up this seat not only loses us strength in Congress when we have an eighty vote deficit, it also provides support to the already deeply entrenched belief in the black community (and other minority communities) that Republicans don’t give a damn about their votes.

So, Cao for Congress 2010. Vitter for Senate 2010. Donate, help them lay the groundwork for their campaigns for re-election. These are two very good men. After those races are won, perhaps we can get Cao to run for Lt. Governor and get him set up for the run to succeed Governor Jindal in 2015.