Politics – Page 119 – Shall Not Be Questioned

On Staying Home

This is an excellent post, overall, on advice for those backing their favorite anti-Mitt candidate, but this is the most profound piece of advice in the post:

I hear those among you who say youâ€™ll sit this election out. Â â€If the party loses because they didnâ€™t go conservative enough for me, itâ€™ll teach them a lessonâ€. Â Thatâ€™s not only groaningly solipsistic â€“ itâ€™s not, after all, all about you â€“ itâ€™s also just not the way political parties and organizations work. Â Iâ€™ve said it a few times in the past few weeks, and Iâ€™m going to keep saying it until yâ€™all get it right;Â Political parties donâ€™t â€œlearn lessonsâ€ â€“ they reflect the will of those who show up. Â And if conservatives â€“ and all you libertarian Ron Paul supporters â€“ donâ€™t show up, then the â€œestablishment wins.

This is more true than many realize. I am most decidedly not a fan of how the GOP operates in both my county, and also the state, but the fact of the matter is you have to show up if you want to be have your voice heard. That requires, to some degree, knowing when to stick to your principles, and when to be willing to remain a part of a larger coalition. Too many make the mistake of believing that politics is about principles. It’s about no such thing. Politics is a beauty contest for ugly people. Principles provide you with goals; they tell you where you want to try to bring things in four years.

The rest of that game is all playing your cards well. But you have to be in the game if you want to have a possibility of winning. The big problem with libertarians is they make the mistake of believing politics is a philosophical debate, rather than a card game. It’s a lot more the latter than the former. You have to play the cards your dealt, and the only thing that is going to save our asses in this hand is the fact that our opponents have to play a worse one.

Chainsaw Ripping Through the Door

I read about this wrong house raid incident last night, and I have to agree with SayUncle on this one:

Using a chainsaw seems to me to be unnecessarily dangerous and doesnâ€™t lend itself to stealth. Also, if I were sitting around my house and I saw and heard a chainsaw coming through the door, my first thought will not beÂ itâ€™s the police and I should cooperate.

Yeah, I would not think someone chainsawing my door is the cops. Then again, it would have to be an awfully stupid prowler too, considering how much noise that makes.

Proof that F&F Was a Plot to Bring About Gun Control

Dave Hardy links to the smoking gun at the Arizona star. Essentially F&F was concocted by the same people behind the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. The smoking quote:

In an April 2010 e-mail to a colleague, Burke predicted that the operation would have a huge public impact: “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons,” he wrote. “Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”

So the response was to traffic more guns, and rack up more dead bodies, then hopefully the American people would wake up and ban these dangerous guns? This guy needs to go to jail.

What is an Establishment Candidate?

I can’t tell you how many places I’ve read that have people on the farther side of the right spectrum complaining about how Mitt Romney has been “forced” on voters as the GOP nominee. He’s just what the establishment wants. Well what does being the establishment candidate who is forced on us really mean?

It’s a legitimate question to explore since I don’t particularly like him. But, I don’t think forced is an accurate term, nor do I think what is happening with Mitt an example of the establishment anointing a candidate. If you really want to see a case of that happening, look no farther than Pennsylvania.

Consider the Keystone State’s U.S. Senate race this year. There are three reasonably well-known candidates, and one really rich guy who can buy enough ads to make himself well-known. Candidate A from the state’s population center is wealthy, but he’s never run a campaign. He’s only reasonably well-known in political circles because he has tried to run before, but he never actually got any campaigns off the ground since better-known Republicans stepped in and asked him to step aside. Candidate B has run a campaign and came within a very close margin of winning in a district that had voted Democratic for the seat since 1974. He has a national fundraising list to bring to the table, and he has a record with a campaign that could put numbers on the board even in a tough district. Candidate C is a former gubernatorial candidate who really didn’t resonate with GOP voters in his last primary, but he at least has experience trying to run in a statewide race. He would have a statewide donor list, presumably, so that should count for something. Candidate D is just the rich guy who doesn’t seem to bring much else to the table.

So, given all of these factors, you’d think that Candidates B & C would be the likely strongest candidates, right? Well, the state GOP leaders decided that they liked Candidate A. They liked him so much that they will provide him with official party resources in order to win the primary so he can work against other Republicans. Voters will technically have a say in the primary, but they want to make sure that party resources are provided for shoving their choice in our faces before the general election.

That, my friends, is what I call an establishment candidate. When the party quite literally spends official resources to back their personal favorite and possibly use the resources to attack other Republican candidates, that’s not allowing voters to really decide. I had never heard of such a process until I moved to Pennsylvania. It’s not just at the state level. I’ve watched county GOP officials disparage other Republicans who aren’t in their little approved circle and take them to court for minor things. It’s absurd to waste party resources eating our own, but that seems to be the official GOP way in Pennsylvania.

So, considering this example of truly having a candidate financially backed by party resources and picked in a room of party leaders, is Mitt in the same category?

The fact is that Mitt has won 772,064 Republican votes, according to the Wall Street Journal. To me, that means that Republicans are voting for the man. I may not like him, but I’m not going to claim that those 772,000 are all secretly party leaders picking the presidential nominee for the party. They are voters.

Bean Heiress Getting Her Wookie Suit On

L.L. Bean is my favorite clothing store. I am not particularly wrapped up in fashion, as anyone who has ever met me will attest to. I just like the way their clothes fit, and like the flannel lined jeans in the winter. If I order something online in XL Tall, I know what I’m getting will fit me well. Other men’s clothing vendors are becoming like women’s clothing, where shit in the same size from two different vendors doesn’t fit the same way. That’s why I’m happy to see that the Bean family is getting their Wookie Suit on:

He even landed the covetedÂ L.L. BeanÂ endorsement â€“ that’s Linda LorraineÂ Bean, heiress of the L.L. Bean empire and a lobster roll entrepreneur in her own right. She endorsed Paul on Saturday from her restaurant in the retail outlet mecca ofÂ Freeport.

Asked why she wasnâ€™t supporting fellow New Englander Mitt Romney, Ms. Bean said â€œIâ€™ve always been for Ron Paulâ€,Â according to a statementÂ posted on Paulâ€™s campaign web site.

I’m not enough of a Wookie Suiter to support Paul, largely for the same reasons Megan McArdle doesn’t like him, but it’s good knowing I’m not forking over my hard earned clothing dollars to dirty hippies.

Extinct Species are Better than Hunting

This video is a must watch from CBS on the economics of saving endangered species through hunting. Though a couple of the questions are a bit over the top (how do you kill something you love?), it’s overwhelmingly fair. And yes, the animal rights activist argues that she’d rather see a species struggle to survive than be raised in the United States and potentially hunted once the numbers are high enough.

The rule the mention that will basically slash the numbers of near-extinct animals to almost nil can be found here and has a bit of history to it. Consider this from the background information from the Fish & Wildlife Service:

With the exception of reintroduced animals, no sightings of the scimitar-horned oryx have been reported since the late 1980s. …

Based on a 2010 census of its members, the Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA) estimates there are 11,032 scimitar-horned oryx, 5,112 addax, and 894 dama gazelle on EWA member ranches.

Just on member ranches, there are more than 11,000 animals of a species that hasn’t been see on its original home turf in North Africa in 30 years. Yet, it’s not acceptable that these animals are raised and thrive in a new land according to an activist who purportedly wants the species to live.

I asked someone who knows animal issues and the federal government if this falls squarely on the Obama Administration. I was told yes and no. As it was explained to me, while the Fish & Wildlife Service was forced into the position by the courts, the Administration could have fixed the flaws in the original rule that allowed the hunts to take place. They didn’t, so now the hunts are ending.

As I’ve grown so fond of saying in recent years, elections have consequences. For these 11,000 scimitar-horned oryx, it’s pretty much a death sentence with possible extinction of the species. For hunters, it’s access to unique hunting opportunities where the profits will go back into recovering the species for future generations. For gun owners in general, well, it’s just another door closing on one the traditions for some in our community.

Another Beating in Philly

This is becoming a weekend pasttime, it seems. This time a cabbie interveined with a tire iron and the miscreants fled. They were caught, and are being charged as juveniles. I’m calling BS on that. If they are old enough to beat people, they are old enough to be tried as adults.

But yeah, what kind of paranoid freak would carry a gun in that city?

Ammo Ban in New Jersey

Looks like the legislature is considering giving the attorney general carte blanche to ban whatever ammo he or she wants. Also on the table is a proposal that would criminalize using a “defaced” firearm. But as is noted, the definition of that is so vague it could apply to a firearm that was refinished or subjected to ordinary wear or rusting.

Funny how other state legislatures seem to be able to define scratching off a serial number unambiguously, but Jersey can’t. They’ve been listening to the likes of Bryan Miller, who seems to have a goal to get more gun owners behind bars, for far too long.

The Soylent Green is Fetuses (or is that Feti?) Problem

Tam pretty much sums up my thoughts on what I had previously believed was a non-existent problem, of people making food out of aborted fetuses:

Meanwhile, Oklahoma is becoming a vanguard state in the struggle toÂ ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food products to be consumed by humans, a problem heretofore unknown by anyone, save that narrow demographic consisting of insomniacs who own shortwave radios.

My god, it’s like the Age of Reason never even happened.

I’ve been pondering if our elected leaders have never really been all that bright, but we could count on dead tree media to politely hide the worst of the idiocy from us, or whether we’re really on our way to electing potted plants.

This Can Never Be Good

Jim Geraghty takes a look at Newt’s contract from Freddie Mac, a subject of current controversy. But what interests me, particularly, is the opening line from one of his readers:

I worked at FreddieÂ as a consultant during the same timeframe that Newt was there. I can tell you that the place was creepy with consultants of all ilk. The semi-circle drive in front of the main building was logged jammed with Lincoln Towncars come 4:30 pm every day. Iâ€™ve stood in line with Paul Begala waiting to get a coffee at the Starbucks in the Freddie lobby. Freddie at its height was a multi-trillion-dollar company that had only about 6,000 employees. Everyone else was a consultant or contractor.

There’s no way this is the situation and there’s not an awful lot of fleecing going on.