2010 – Page 54 – Shall Not Be Questioned

A Party Leader to Be Ousted

Political parties, contrary to some tea party rhetoric, are not monolithic entities that are impossible to infiltrate or persuade. They are made up of real people, often your neighbors. Yes, you might be shocked to find out that political parties often have offices that represent even specific neighborhoods.

As with any group of real people, especially those trying to influence policy, some will make mistakes. All will try to use their role to give their favorite candidates and causes a higher profile with other party members and voters. That’s not a bad thing, even if sometimes a few act pretty stupidly while doing it.

But there are a few who have an absolutely toxic view of their role and how they are there to tell people how to vote and what is best. They aren’t willing to argue the merits of a specific candidate or policy. That is what you have in New York.

Vinny Reda, the partyâ€™s vice chairman and the Rockland County committee chair, explained Tuesday that he believed Paladinoâ€™s campaign was a distraction.

â€œWe very, very rarely have primaries, and I for one am very much against primaries. I find them very divisive,â€ he said.

â€œItâ€™s true, itâ€™s been difficult, which is why I think we had a light turnout all over the state,â€ Reda continued. â€œThe Republicans just arenâ€™t used to primaries. â€¦ People are confused, theyâ€™re getting mail from different directions, and thatâ€™s why they need the party organizations to set them straight and point them toward the endorsed candidates.â€

He believes it is his job to tell voters how to vote and “set them straight” rather than merely doing the work of arguing on behalf of their endorsed candidates. More importantly, he doesn’t even want to have a system where others can express their disagreement. That is truly a toxic view. The New York Republicans should chase that guy out of the party. Even if his endorsed slate did have better candidates, the fact that he’ll tell reporters he’d rather do away with primaries than be forced to defend or promote a candidate to voters based on merits means he needs to go. The position has gone to his head, so it’s time to cut it off. The power, I mean. Not his head.

Gunsmith of Williamsburg, and Other Junior High Films

Many thanks to Clayton for pointing this series of videos out:

You can see some other parts on YouTube here and here. I probably watched some of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation videos myself when I was in Junior High too. It’s occurred to me that I was probably among the last of the 16mm film reel generation. When I entered high school, the schools were just starting to get the newfangled Laser Discs, which could be controlled with a nifty Apple IIGS computer. Kids today will never know the disappointment of being subject to regular lessons because the projector wouldn’t track correctly, the film reel broke, or the bulb in the projector blew out (some teachers knew how to fix these things, others didn’t). I’m sure with a new generation of media came a new generation of films, which means kids today will miss out on the delight of what I saw in Volcano National Park in Hawaii, reliving some interests from childhood:

Parts two,Â three and four if you’re interested. Documentary filmmaking today doesn’t have the same dry, cheesy appeal. No dramatic score, or inappropriately deadpan, unenthusiastic narrator. In part four, at the end, I was particularly struck by the fact that they used, as evidence of mother nature recovering, that they tilled over the soil, and planted some papayas, and they grew, dammit! Today it would be some kumbayaÂ crap about fragile native plants that man as clearly destroying growing in the lava, and starting the cycle anew, rather than man punching mother nature right back in her face and getting some farming action back on.

As it is, I hiked through the area mentioned here, and it’s still pretty desolate.

I guess we didn’t punch mother nature quite hard enough. Not often you get to hike on naturally made, volcanic gravel — a remnant of the lava fountain that spewed here for a while.

Clearly Not Happy

The Brady Campaign’s press release suggests they are bummed about last night’s primary results. Losing Castle is a pretty big loss for them. They call him a moderate, but he was willing to lead on the issues that were important to them. From a Second Amendment perspective, I couldn’t be more thrilled about last night. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t like Republicans who rail against the evils of pornography, masturbation and evolution, I’m less thrilled. But I dislikeÂ bearded marxists more, so here’s looking toward November.

Bloomberg Mayor Get Three Years

Dave Hardy has the story. He was convicted back in June for accepting bribes from contractors, in the form of home improvements, so that they could keep lucrative city contracts.

Man with a Gun

The Portland police set up a perimeter of officers with rifles drawn for reports of a man with a gun. At a gun store. (Link stolen from Radley.)

Thoughts from Others on O’Donnell Victory

Fred Bauer talks about how O’Donnell actually pulled it off, after a career of being somewhat of a joke in Delaware politics. Overall, I think her victory ends up being a good thing, even if I think she’s a lousy candidate. Not so much for the practical impact, but for the message it sends. Castle is obviously dumbfounded, and is, so far, not endorsing O’Donnell. Jonah Goldberg thinks it was a tactical mistake to nominate her, but correctly notes:

When you have an organic grassroots uprising, itâ€™s sort of silly to expect that it will make every decision with surgical skill and perfect foresight. Indeed, the attempt to play mincing games of compromise threatens to cool the very passions that have gotten us this far. In this Rush, I think, isÂ basically right.

Jim Geraghty also relays a letter from a Delaware native that seems to grasp the First State’s political climate quite well:

Both parties in Delaware have been led by blue-blood patrician types for eons. That probably isnâ€™t unusual in most states, but in a small state it plays out in a very interesting way. The big donors and loyalists of both parties are members of the same bar association, members of the same country clubs, do business together and send their kids to the same private schools. They live in the same neighborhoods, too. This co-mingling created a genteel centrist quality in Delaware politics that has not been challenged in any significant way, until now.

Last, but certainly not least is from the Belmont Club:

Itâ€™s news that nobody from the establishment wants to hear. The Democrats may win Delaware, but at the price of watching a new political fault line define itself without being able to take much advantage of it. To the traditional horizontal divide between Republican and Democrat is added a vertical one: Washington insider vs outsider. It has divided politics into quadrants.

I think, in the end, O’Donnell’s victory may be a tactical loss, but strategically, it probably needed to happen. What surprising is that Mike Castle was able to avoid a significant primary challenge for as long as he did. It was his time to go.

Idiots in Hawaii: Lava Girls

I have to say, one of the highlights of the trip was Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. But not just because of the dried lava hikes, glowing lava lakes, steaming ocean entry points, and beautiful scenery. The pair of resort flowers we later dubbed “The Lava Girls” really made the trip worthwhile.

As we did our stroll down Chain of Craters Road, we pulled off at all of the crater scenic stops. Puhimau Crater was a perfectly lovely picture-taking spot until the Lava Girls walked up. The first was dressed in fashionable not-very-park-appropriate clothes and marching with determination up to the viewing area. The other in skin tight workout clothes yapping on her cell phone and yelling, “We’re in Hawaii looking for lava! We just want to see lava today.”

For those of you who didn’t have maps that said in nice bold letters that you could only see glow at the sea and from Jaggar Museum handed out at the door of the Visitor’s Center, this is the explanation from USGS on why these girls were in the wrong damn place:

Puhimau pit crater is about 160 m deep. The crater probably formed between the mid-15th century and A.D. 1800. No eruptions have occurred from Puhimau Crater, and no lava flows from historical eruptions have poured into the crater. Dense forest surrounds the crater, but a small thermal area lies just north of the crater. Steam often can be seen low on the northwest wall. (Emphasis added.)

Lava girls stomped off back to their car and sped down the road to their next crater stop.

I’ll assume they left very unsatisfied. I would even put money on one of them saying something like, “They totally lied – there were no volcanoes at that park!”

There was a great glow from the lava lake that night, but I’m sure they never saw it. We were both tempted to give them directions to the nearest sources of lava just to remove them from the gene pool. Unfortunately, without any surface breakout, that would be tough. (Of course, with surface breakout, it would have been tough since they weren’t dressed for hiking on lava – typically the first step in finding the hot, flowing stuff.)

Another Mental Exercise for the Bradyphile

I heard reports of Reasoned Discourse breaking out over at Common Gunsense, but my comments seem to have gotten approved. But I will offer another thought exercise for Ms. Japete. Consider this article from the UK talking about what a mess their gun laws have become. Ours are really not much better. The other side talks about working together, and arriving at common ground. The other side talks about the importance of universal background checks. But how dedicated is Ms. Japete and the Bradyphiles to that proposition? What follows is meant to be a mental exercise, not a proposition for a serious policy prescription.

What if gun owners finally accepted the Brady way and acquiesced to a licensing scheme, and for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s tied into the criminal databases so that it gets revoked immediately if you’re convicted of a disabling offense, or go bonkers and get involuntarily committed. Sounds good right? A Brady dream. Oh, but there’s a catch.

The license is available at any post office, costs five dollars, and is valid for as long as you aren’t convicted of a disabling offense. Licensed individuals in any state can buy, sell, trade, transport, and ship firearms to licensed individuals in any other state, or to import firearms from outside the United States. This means licensed individuals can buy firearms off the Internet. The license is also a valid license to carry a loaded firearm, concealed or otherwise, in all fifty states. There are no dealer or manufacturer FFLs. Dealers and manufacturers are only required to make sure their employees who handle guns or gun parts have a license. Non-licensees can possess firearms only under limited circumstances (such as taking someone target shooting, or if your non-licensed wife has to use your gun in self-defense, etc).

This is a general framework. Obviously there are details that would need to be filled in. But if this is not an acceptable regime to the Bradyphile, then the real concern has nothing to do with background checks, or it being “too easy for dangerous people to get guns.”

Christine O’Donnell Wins Delaware Primary

NRA can now put Mike Castle’s proverbial head on a pike outside HQ, and start carving Lindsey Graham’s name into the next sharp stick. It’s one thing to be a RINO, it’s quite another not to understand which groups you don’t want to piss off and mobilize. While I think that O’Donnell is, well, nutty as a fruitcake, I do hope she beats the formerly bearded marxist. Given the choice between crazy and nuts, I’ll take nuts.

I truly feel sorry for Delaware voters. The sad thing is, I would still feel the same way if it had gone the other way. I don’t shed any tears for Mike Castle. The electorate is pissed. He’s just the latest career politician that’s gotten what’s coming to him. I don’t think the anger is over yet, as I’m sure they are going to find out come November.

Where is the True Conservative?

Click here and watch this. It’s great commentary on the Delaware senate race. (Link stolen from @Collins_Joe.)