The right-wing liberal

I'm over on Wordpress now

2007-12-05T01:41:00.000-05:00

So look for the new post (and make your comments) over there.

What the new intelligence on Iran (if accurate) means (and it's not what you think)

2007-12-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

After watching Tom Brady pull a rabbit out of his helmet last night, I took some time to ponder the new intelligence report that says the Iranian mullahcracy ended its nuclear weapons program in late 2003. A thought occurred, one that I believe shifts the entire paradigm of the WBK War (especially the Iraq theatre).

Wouldn't you know it; Victor Davis Hanson beat me to it (National Review Online - The Corner):

The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.
Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that, Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture around (say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.
After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war . . .

Lest anyone forget (and as Hanson notes), Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi handed over his WMD program in response to the American liberation of Iraq. Assuming the National Intelligence Estimate got this right, is it too hard to believe the mullahs in Tehran - faced with over 100,000 American troops just next door, took a similar course?

Meanwhile, it should be noted that the Khomeinists - even if they really did end their nuclear weapons program - have not stopped enriching uranium.

So why did they halt the weapons program, and why did they repeatedly refuse to cooperate fully with the United Nations' watchdog on this - the International Atomic Energy Agency?

I think the answer can, again, be found next door in Iraq. I'm guessing the Iranian regime was fairly confident that it could thwart any real UN punishment thanks to its friends on the Security Council (Communist China and Russia), when President Bush decided to liberate Iraq without the UN imprimatur, it likely forced some serious rethinking in Tehran. After all, if Moscow, Beijing, and Paris couldn't save Saddam Hussein, what chance would the mullahcracy, which was far more alienated from its neighbors to begin with, have?

So, if the mullahs really did put their nuclear weapons program on hold, this is the most likely reason.

As for continuing to play games with the IAEA, don't forget that while American troops are still there, so is the possibility (which increases exponentially if the Democrats win next year's elections) that they will leave defeated and hand Iraq over to the mullahs. Such an event would be a dramatic setback for American morale and power, so much that so that Iran could almost certainly resume its nuclear weapons program without any worries about an American military response.

You think that's far-fetched? Don't forget to tyrannical adventurism that followed the fall of South Vietnam. Convinced that America was on the ropes, the Soviet Union moved aggressively on any front it could find: Southeast Asia (Laos and Cambodia), Africa (Angola and Ethiopia), Central America (Nicaragua and Grenada), and of course, Central Asia (Afghanistan).

Iran would certainly take an American defeat in Iraq as a green-light to resume its nuclear-arms ambitions. By contrast, if America left Iraq with a functioning, representative, and anti-Khomeinist government, the mullahs would be faced with a pro-American regime next door with its eyes almost permanently fixed on then to make sure they weren't trying anything funny. Moreover, any military action taken against Iran in this scenario would likely include an Iraqi government far more popular within Iraq and outside it than Saddam ever was.

In other words, this new report (if accurate) has dramatically raised the stakes in Iraq. It has shown us that the resolve of President Bush (and the 62-million-plus who voted for him) has not only prevented the creation of an al-Qaeda haven in the heart of the Middle East; it has also thwarted the regional arms race that so many feared - and it will take the resolve of a new President to stay the course until the Iraqi people elect an anti-Khomeinist government in December 2009.

This report may have undermined the case for military action against the mulllahcracy, but it dramatically makes more imperative the need to finishing the liberation of Iraq - and to elect a President who is willing to do that.

Virginia's runaway state spending gives the facade of frugality to - New Jersey

2007-12-03T23:14:00.000-05:00

Eighteen years ago last month, two Democrats were elected governors in Virginia and New Jersey; both ran on promises not to raise taxes. Two months later, facing yawning budget deficits, New Jersey's Jim Florio imposed what at the time was the largest state tax increase in American history (New York Times). Within months, I left New Jersey to start my college education at William and Mary, and I found a local political elite convulsed in rage and depression because Virginia's Governor - Doug Wilder - refused to raise taxes and instead cut spending. I decided then and there that Virginia would be my home.

Well, today, which state is more frugal with taxpayer dollars? Is it Virginia, home to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and the legacy of limited government in America - a legacy that crossed over two centuries and made the first African-American elected governor one of the most underrated chief executives in American history?

Nope.

In 2002, as two new Democratic governors took over in these states (Jim McGreevey in New Jersey, Mark Warner in Virginia), state spending was roughly equal. Since then, however, as Warner supposedly made "tough" budget decisions (don't believe him, state spending rose nearly ten percent in Warner's first budget), as he then insisted on a $1.4 billion tax increase in 2004 (as spending went up nearly $10 billion), and as Republicans in the legislature came up with the transportation tax hike of 2007), Virginia's runaway state spending left the previously profligate Garden State in the dust.

New Jersey enacts its budget every year, while Virginia enacts it every two years (although there are amendments in the "off"-year). In Fiscal Year 2007, New Jersey spent $30.8 billion; in FY08, $33.5 billion. The total expenditure over the biennium is currently as $64.3 billion.

During this same two-year period, Virginia's spending stands over $74.2 billion - a difference of nearly $5 billion a year.

Mind you, New Jersey has had Democratic governors and Democratic-controlled legislatures during the last half-dozen years, yet with a larger population, they still managed to keep spending more than 13% below Virginia, despite our Republican-controlled legislature. Even the split General Assembly that will convene in January will give the GOP more power than it ever had in the New Jersey legislature since January 2002.

Kindly remember these numbers, dear readers, when Governor Kaine and his Republican enablers (they know how they are) insist on higher taxes.

How about that - Anonymous Is a Woman and I agree on something

2007-12-03T23:07:00.000-05:00

ASIW lent a post to Not Larry Sabato about the Venezuelan voters serving Hugo Chavez some surprising humble pie. She focused particularly on the youth movement that rose up against Chavez and thwarted his attempt to permanently remove all institutional obstacles to his power:

These students’ actions are a testament to the power of grassroots activism in defending democracy from an encroaching dictator.

Indeed, as we argue, throw cyber-brickbats at each other, drive each other nuts, and otherwise entertain ourselves, we should remember that in many parts of the world, the vote is itself the thin purple line that holds back tyranny. In the most unlikeliest of places (Venezuela) it held back the tyrant this week:

At the end of the day, even long time Chavez supporters opposed his power grab. Here’s the Washington Post’s quote:
"People who have been with Chávez do not support the reform," said Elixio Fusil, who lives in a pro-Chávez district in western Caracas and voted against the reforms. "He wants a blank check, and that's impossible. We're not stupid like he thinks. It's that simple. There are conscious, thinking people here, too."
That about sums it up! Nothing is more important than liberty and freedom. Without that there is no discussion.

Bravo, ASIW. I couldn't have said it better myself

Why Ron Paul won

2007-12-02T21:50:00.000-05:00

As one would expect, there is a lot of scuttlebutt over the results of the Virginia GOP Advance straw poll from yesterday. Those who support Ron Paul (including my new friend and fellow Republican Liberty Caucus officer, Rick Sincere) chalk it up to the "Ron Paul Revolution" coming ashore. Non-Paul supporters (such as SWAC Girl and Now at the Podium) are completely dismissive of the results, and have gone so far as to try and give the gold to Fred Thompson, who finished second (Shaun Kenney's post headline is a humorous expression of this).

Now, SWAC Girl and Rick S. are my friends; so it hurts to say this, but they're both wrong. I can't speak to the other straw polls Paul has won, but since I was at the Advance, I think I can explain what happened there.

First, though, I think I have to explain the deep division among the Paulites (my term). From my experience, there are two types of Ron Paul supporters: Republicans who support him, and non-Republicans who support him. Let's start with the first group.

Republicans who support Ron Paul: I happen to have met about fifteen of them at the RLC-VA meeting yesterday. They are earnest and dedicated activists who have been at this for a long time, and believe limited government should be the raison d'etre of the Republican Party (a view I share). They are largely non-interventionist on foreign policy, which should not be confused with isolationist; they generally believe America is too good for the rest of the world. While I disagree strongly with this view (non-intervention has been tried before in American history; the result was the War of 1812), I can at least understand the argument.

More to the point, outside of foreign affairs, these people are dedicated right-wingers. I presented my vision for the RLC-VA mainly on state issues, in particular the tax increases of 2004 and 2007. Not a peep of disagreement was heard (in fact, we had the secretary of the Virginia Beach Taxpayer Alliance in the room).

One other thing to remember, Ron Paul is running as a pro-lifer (which isn't as strange as it sounds; in New Jersey, for example, pro-lifers have been in control of the state Libertarian Party for at least a decade). This keeps the door wide open for numerous paleo-conservatives (or, to use their term, traditional conservatives) who swallowed very hard and stuck with President Bush in 2004 over social issues. They don't have to do that anymore.

As for non-Republicans who support Ron Paul, these are the leftist wackos that have given Paul his free media, his staying power, and a series of political headaches. They have no real idea of Paul's other views; for them it's all about the WBK War. The fact that Dennis Kucinich could speak so highly of Paul (Cleveland Plain-Dealer) reveals both the ignorance and the tunnel vision of this bunch. I try to avoid this bunch like the plague, and FWIW, at least one Paulite Republican told me he basically agreed.

So, how many of each group showed up yesterday? I'm sure there were a few of the lefty knuckleheads in the ballroom, and I bet SWAC Girl did indeed see some of them (as I was standing in the back, I couldn't see her or them), but I'm guessing overwhelming majority were the former. Why? I have three reasons.

Ron Paul cared about this straw poll: That goes without saying. The number of buses at hand is under debate (I doubt there were many), but there was a very strong movement in the web to make Paul sympathizers aware of the event.

No one else cared: The number of actual candidates who appeared at the straw poll was zero. One candidate had planned to be there (my man, Duncan Hunter) but that was it. The fact is, every other campaign's timeline stops on February 5 (I'm one of the very few people who believes the nomination may not be decided then). The "big five" (Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Romney, and Thompson) have no real reason to spend effort here (where the primary is the 12th) when it can be spent in a state that brings more immediate political dividends. The second and third place finishers prove this point - only Thompson (second) and Huckabee (third) sent proxies of any heft (Thompson had Senator Allen, Huckabee sent his wife).

Still, I don't think either of these reasons trumps the third one: the poll was held in northern Virginia. While northern Virginia is hardly a Republican bastion these days, a number of the conservative movement groups have their national headquarters here, including organizations most likely to have Ron Paul supporters in their midst. With a Republican establishment largely having ignored them for half-a-dozen years, they no longer have the bonds of loyalty to Bush - or before him, perhaps Gingrich - that would otherwise suppress support for an anti-establishment candidate like Paul. To find 200 people in this political grouping who support Paul would be a lot easier than most people realize, but more to the point, for all of them - whatever their number - this was a local event. It is quite possible that a straw poll in Richmond, Hampton Roads, or Roanoke might have had a different result.

What I saw was neither a revolution nor a raid by outside forces. I saw a dedicated group of Republican activists make their voice heard at an event uniquely tailored to them. I also suspect most of them will stay active, and since that means we can rely on them to stand with us against Tim Kaine's soon-to-be-introduced tax increases, I think that's far better news for all of us than my fellow non-Paulites realize.

Two more Republicans who DON'T get it are blogging

2007-12-02T03:02:00.001-05:00

Marty Williams and Brandon Bell, two of the worst tax-hiking cipher to ever darken the door of the Virginia Senate Republican caucus before their local Republicans bounced them last June, have taken their whining to the blogosphere. Bell has taken up space at the Roanoke Red Zone, where he has taken to endorsing the worst Republican in the field, Mike Huckabee. I particularly liked this little euphemism:

Huckabee faced tough challenges in his state--like how to raise revenue to pay for transportation infrastructure. Unlike the borrow and spend attitude in Washington, he chose the pay as you go approach.

Translation: Mike Huckabee could raise taxes and get re-elected, so maybe if he's President I can get back into office, too.

That said, Williams is far worse. He had the audacity to call his blog Reagan's GOP, after doing more to turn the Virginia GOP away from Reagan's legacy of limited government than anyone else. Then, he uses the blog for a nasty, self-serving post in which he basically tells supported of limited government to get out of the party.

So let me set ol' Marty (and Brandon, for that matter) straight on a few things.

For starters, I have been a Republican volunteer for twenty years, longer than I have been a registered voter (and, more to the point, I've been a declared Republican eight years longer than you have, Marty). In that time, I have seen the party get deflated and crushed by the Bush 1990 tax hike, only to recover four years later when they found their way and became the party of limited government again.

I have also been a Virginia voter since 1993, so I know a little about those "hard-fought majorities" you claim. You might not like to hear it, but your first Senate majority (1998) came courtesy of Jim Gilmore, the only politician in Virginia to lead a successful tax revolt. It was voter anger at the car tax that (a) elected Gilmore, and enabled him to appoint Charles Waddell into his cabinet, which got the GOP its 21st Senate seat in the ensuing special election and (b) also elected John Hager Lieutenant Governor, thus giving the party control over the Senate even when it was split 20-20 (prior to Bill Mims winning Waddell's seat). The House majority was once again due to Gilmore, who moved heaven and earth in 1999 to get the GOP to 53 Delegates.

Without Gilmore, you wouldn't have been able to draw the Senate and House districts to give yourselves the substantial legislative majorities that you have since squandered away. It was the vision of low taxes and limited government that made the Republicans the majority party in Virginia. Once you and your fellow Senators moved away from that, the party's majority status was gone.

Of course, all of this may be news to Mr. Bell, since the voters bounced him after one term in 1995, and he needed one of those re-drawn seats to get back into the State Senate in 2003.

So, Marty, allow me to be blunt: you are the cancer in the Republican Party, and the surgery performed by Republican voters in your district successfully stopped you from sickening us any more. Sadly, some more political chemotherapy may be needed. If we do not rid ourselves of all tax-hikers like yourself, we will continue to lose; what is more, we will deserve to lose.

You want to help the Republican Party, Mr. Williams? Either disavow your tax-hiking history, or just stay away. It's your choice.

A new chapter (on a few levels)

2007-12-01T22:22:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, the Republican Liberty Caucus of Virginia elected its officers for the year. I am deeply honored to be the new Chairman of RLC-VA. The other officers are: Greg "Bert" Mueller - Vice Chairman, Rick Sincere - Secretary, and Cliff Dunn - Treasurer. The turnout for the meeting was larger than expected, and I saw a few friends from the blogosphere there, including Shaun Kenney and Leslie Carbone.

I, for one, am looking very forward to making RLC-VA a force in ensuring that no tax increases come out of Richmond next year.

Senate candidate or no Senate candidate, Chris Saxman still voted for a tax hike

2007-11-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

By the time my next post is slapped up (or indeed, by the time you read this), Delegate Chris Saxman may already be a candidate for the U.S. Senate (Bacon's Rebellion and Too Conservative), and I'm sure he'll get plenty of buzz and plenty of support - including support from the blogosphere.

I, however, am compelled to remind everyone that Chris Saxman voted for HB3202, the transportation tax hike of 2007. As such, he both unreliable on limited government issues and all-but-certain to get crushed in the general election. I don't care if he's a "new face" - northern Virginia and Hampton Roads voters will vote against him just on HB3202 alone.

The alternative to Jim Gilmore is not Chris Saxman; it's Bob Marshall.

I guess I'll be able to enjoy myself after all

2007-11-30T13:18:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a big risk by trusting Ben Tribbett (a.k.a. Not Larry Sabato), especailly since this is just too good to be true (CAPS in original):

TOM DAVIS IS BOYCOTTING THE ADVANCE
HIS STAFF IS TELLING PEOPLE HE DOESN'T WANT TO MINGLE WITH PEOPLE THAT WANT TO DESTROY THE PARTY!!!!

Now, Tom Davis was one of the leading movers and shakers behind the HB3202 debacle and the subsequent pasting the party received on November 6. For him to claim that those of us who opposed this nonsense "want to destroy the party" is outrageous, ridiculous, and slanderous.

Still, as someone who'll be attending the Advance tomorrow afternoon, I'm too happy to care right now, because this means I won't have to endure Mr. Milquetoast.

So Ben, you better be right.

Constitution, shmonstitution, we're taking your money now!

2007-11-30T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (one of the bastard twins spawned by HB3202 - the transportation tax hike of 2007) has decided to starting imposing taxes on northern Virginians before the State Supreme Court rules on the legality of said taxes (Washington Examiner, emphasis added):

Northern Virginians will begin paying new taxes and fees to fund transportation Jan. 1 even though the state Supreme Court will not have ruled on the levies’ legality.
The state’s high court is scheduled to hear arguments in January in a lawsuit challenging the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority’s power to impose the new taxes and fees.
. . .
“We realized we need to start right away,” said David Snyder, who heads the authority’s legal subcommittee. “We would rather have to deal with refunds than give up the revenue we would not collect during that waiting period.”

Thank you, Mr. Snyder, for reminding us all that in a decision like this, bureaucrats like you always err on the side seizing more taxpayer money.

Sadly, even one of the very few elected officials who stood up to this nonsense last spring is standing down now:

“I am still opposed to the taxes and fees being collected, but if they are going to be collected, it seems to me that the NVTA should get on with its work,” said Del. Jeff Frederick, R-Prince William County, an NVTA member who fought the funding package.

I can only assume Delegate Frederick was bored by his 59% victory a few weeks ago and wants the excitement of his 2005 nail-biter race back.

There is one voice of sanity quoted in the article:

"It shows how excited they are to raise taxes,” said James Parmalee, head of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance. “Some of the fees would be easier to refund than others. It is one thing when the government has a record and can send you a refund check, but every single auto repair shop would have the burden of refunding money to all of their customers."

"It shows how excited they are to raise taxes." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Put away the sharp objects over at Democratic Central - Murtha just complemented the surge

2007-11-30T11:58:00.000-05:00

Almost a week ago, I noticed Democratic Central blogger cvllelaw making (at best) a stunning mistake on how the military releases information about Iraq.

During that particularly mistaken post, c-law cited the doves' favorite politician - John Murtha - to justify skepticism about DoD was telling us:

. . . I find myself agreeing with Jack Murtha, who was on camera yesterday challenging a reporter who asked him about such reports. And Murtha's angry answer was, "And you believe them? You believe what they tell you over at the Pentagon?"

I can only imagine c-law's reaction to this (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, h/t Bruce McQain at Q and O and Jerry Fuhrman at From on High):

U.S. Rep. John Murtha today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week . . . "I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year.

Now, Murtha still has issues with the Iraqi government, but then again, so do I. The important thing here is that Murtha's hell-bent opposition to our liberation efforts has literally frozen over. His fellow Democrats are already scrambling (Politico, h/t McQuain):

"This could be a real headache for us," said one top House Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Pelosi is going to be furious."

To say nothing about cvllelaw.

Party registration bill introduced

2007-11-30T11:32:00.000-05:00

Delegate Scott Lingamfelter has introduced a measure to bring party registration to Virginia, the very thing i recommended yesterday (of course, Lingamfelter did it before I said a word).

How much of a no-brainer is this? Well, when Greg Letiecq (a.k.a. Black Velvet Bruce Li) and James Young (see first comment) can both support it, the discussion is over.

Phil Forgit? Forget it.

2007-11-29T14:52:00.000-05:00

After I took a look at Lucky Narain (and came to the conclusion that he doesn't cut it), I figured I should, at the very least, give the Democratic nominee for the 1st Congressional District, Phil Forgit a once over. It took a little longer than I thought, largely because Forgit is even more of a cipher than Rob Wittman. Still, I was able to determine that Phil Forgit would definitely not get my vote, even if I wasn't bound by the pledge I gave at the 1st District convention.

Forgit is shrewd enough to reveal next-to-nothing about his views, but he does let a little seep out. Here's his comments to the Free Lance-Star (emphasis added) on the transportation tax hike of 2007:

"You get this idea of broken government" when he knocks on doors and talks to voters, Forgit said in an interview. "We don't want the broken politics anymore."
He cited the transportation plan the Virginia General Assembly passed this past session--for which Wittman voted--as an example. He thinks it's bad public policy to approve a plan that imposes fees and local taxes instead of state taxes, and says voters shouldn't send someone who supported that to Washington.

Now, readers of this blog know full well that I can't stand the "transportation plan the Virginia General Assembly passed this session" - indeed, Wittman's vote in favor of it is the sole, and just deserved, reason I have been so hard on him. However, the notion that the better solution is more "state taxes" is yet another typical Democratic answer to a problem - throw more of your money at it and hope it (or you) go away. It was the same logic the Richmond Democrats had this year, when they only alternative they had to HB3202 was a statewide tax increase.

Then again, Forgit is the Democrat here.

Meanwhile, the only other time I can find Forgit talking about an issue (as opposed to his bio, which I admit is impressive) is his views on Iraq (Richmond Times-Dispatch, emphasis added): "Forgit said he would hope to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within two years but opposes setting a timetable."

Check out the timing there. "Within two years" means right before the Iraqi election of 2009, which as I have emphasized time and time again is the most critical event in the entire liberation effort. A drawdown as proposed by Forgit would be a huge boost to the Iranian-tainted parties that have congealed behind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while dealing a serious morale blow to the anti-Iranian opposition, both Sunni and Shiite.

A candidate who was aware of why so many Sunnis are now supporting us over al Qaeda - the President's heavy emphasis on ending Iranian infiltration in Iraq - would have recognized that pulling American troops out of there before Iraqi voters can bounce this government is a terrible idea. Yes, I now Forgit has actually served there, but he came home in 2006, before the President's anti-Iranian emphasis could take effect. Sadly, he appears not to have factored in Iran's meddling into his views on the subject.

No, I'm not going to use the rest of this post to praise Rob Wittman. My views on him have not changed. I will only say this: I am bound by my convention pledge to vote for him, but Forgit and Narain have made honoring that pledge a lot easier than I initially feared.

The "loyalty oath" and the history of Democrats messing up GOP nominations

2007-11-29T08:51:00.000-05:00

I must confess to being a little surprised at the vehement reaction to the new Virginia Republican half-pledge for presidential primary voters. Leslie Carbone has been particularly scathing, but as she notes, she's not alone.

This is not to say I think the pledge was a good idea. I think Doug Mataconis (a.k.a. Below the Beltway) hits the nail on the head:

Either change Virginia law to provide that only “registered” party members can vote in primaries or pick your candidate via convention.

Indeed, "closed" primaries (which is where only registered members vote) is the better course.

That said, I am surprised that there seems to be so little concern for Democrats influencing the GOP nomination process. Limited-government supporters in particular have been badly burned by Democratic meddling, which - contrary to the ridiculously ignorant reporting in MSM - has been going on for well over fifty years.

In 1952, the party faced an enormous and painful task. With the Democratic party divided and foundering, American voters were looking to the Republicans for leadership for the first time in twenty years. The GOP itself faced a dramatic battle between General Dwight Eisenhower (the candidate of the party's pro-New Deal "left" wing) and Ohio Senator Robert Taft (the pro-limited government candidate and the favorite of the party's right).

During the nomination battle (as noted by Stephen Ambrose in Nixon - Volume I: The Education of a Politician (1913-1962), Southern Democrats took over some state GOP conventions in order to send their own delegates (who supported Eisenhower) to the national convention. The state leaders (mostly loyal to Taft) disallowed them because they were Democrats. Eisenhower - who didn't have a majority at the convention without the questionable delegates - convinced delegates from the other GOP candidates (Earl Warren - yes, that Earl Warren - and Harold Stassen) to support seating his delegates. He carried the vote, got his delegates, and cruised to the nomination on the first ballot.

Taft supporters were livid (many refused to support Eisenhower at all); more to the point, the best chance for a campaign on the wisdom of the New Deal (let alone the possibility of returning to the more limited government of the pre-1933 era) was gone. Eisenhower won the general election in a landslide, most of his southern "Republican" delegates went back to the Democrats, and the Eisenhower Administration largely aligned with the southern Democrats throughout the 1950s. As a result, federal spending began an upward spiral (it doubled - at least - in every decade from the 1950s to the 1980s).

For the record, I make no implication about Earl Warren's subsequent appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As hard as it is to believe now, Warren had a right-wing reputation back then (he had been a strike-breaking Governor of California), and his appointment was widely supported.

For Republicans worried about Democratic interference (at least those of us with long memories or an above-average knowledge of history), there is no better example than the convention of 1952. However, there have been other Democratic shenanigans. Fairfax County's history is replete with Democrats using the open primary to get the weakest GOP candidate nominated. Conversely, in the 54th House of Delegates District (my home district), supporters of tax-hiking Republican Bobby Orrock openly invited Democrats to vote for him in the GOP primary against his low-tax, limited government challenger (Full Disclosure: said challenger was my close friend, Shaun Kenney).

So the concern about Democratic interference is hardly paranoid or imaginary; on the contrary, it has a long history that should not be dismissed.

That said, the cure looks worse than the disease here. Since the VA Democrats are holding their own primary on the same day, cross-party interference is not very likely. Also, our primary is on the 12th of February, one week after the Super-Duper Tuesday of February 5, which just might settle both nominations. Finally, even if the GOP race is the only competitive one on the 12th (a scenario that is hardly impossible), it would take a lot of work for the Democrats to organize to the point of overriding the wishes of GOP voters, and it would be impossible to do so without it becoming public, and thus greatly devaluing the entire exercise. The conventions of old and local primaries were and are small enough for a concentrated group of outsiders to gum up the works; a statewide primary is, in my view, to big for something like that (otherwise, George Fitch would have done far better in the 2005 gubernatorial primary against Jerry Kilgore).

So, IMHO, the party should ask the state to change the voter law and allow voters to register with parties - on the condition that they can't change their registration until the following year (which is how it was, and I think still is, done in New Jersey, where I grew up). You'd be surprised how many Democrats will stay away from a Republican primary so they don't get labeled as a Republican for the ensuing twelve months (and vice versa).

Shaun Kenney returns

2007-11-29T08:48:00.000-05:00

The fellow who helped bring me into Spotsylvania politics (for which I'll never forgive him - just kidding) and the VA blogosphere (for which I'll always be grateful) is out of the straitjacket - ahem, position - of RPV Communications Director and back in the blogosphere.

Welcome back, Shaun.

Huckabee called to the carpet . . .

2007-11-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

. . . by, of all people the Associated Press (via Yahoo):

Huckabee likes to say he was tough on taxes in Arkansas, noting a $100 million tax cut in 1997 that until this year was Arkansas' largest. When asked about a fuel tax increase he backed in 1999, Huckabee says incorrectly that he joined 80 percent of Arkansas voters in approving it.
Huckabee in 1999 supported a $1 billion highway bond program, including costs for interest and lawyers' fees, but the question on the ballot was only whether the state could take on the debt, not how Arkansas would pay for it. Huckabee had signed the fuel tax increase two months earlier.
Shortly after taking office, Huckabee took a four-day trip by bass boat along the Arkansas River to tout a 1/8th-cent sales tax increase for outdoor programs. (Two nature centers now carry the names of Huckabee and his wife.) Taxes went up $40 million in the months before the $100 million tax cut Huckabee touts.

Ask not what your Governor can do for you; ask how much you have to pay for your Governor to immortalize himself on a "nature center."

I am not a Redskin fan . . .

2007-11-27T12:32:00.000-05:00

. . . but who cares?

Sean Taylor, Rest In Peace.

More reasons to oppose Mike Huckabee

2007-11-26T23:57:00.000-05:00

Reason #1 - Mother Jones likes him (Jonathan Stein, h/t Jim Geraghty):

The DNC is joining the GOP chorus and slamming Huckabee for being a tax-and-spend politician. I think that's just lame. Democrats support the sort of fiscal responsibility that Huckabee was able to demonstrate: he spent on the right things (mostly), taxed when necessary, cut taxes when possible, and managed the budget in a way that left the state's finances better off. I know the Democrats aren't going to praise a Republican, but at least they can withhold their fire on a pol with such a respectable record.
Especially here: "As Governor, Huckabee implemented an increase on everything from cigarettes, to gasoline and even on driver's licenses," a DNC spokesperson said. Democrats support taxes on cigarettes and gasoline! Can it, DNC!

Reason #2 - Bill Howell (a chief architect of the transportation tax hike of 2007) is his Virginia campaign chairman (Shad Plank).

Need I say more?

Why Mike Huckabee must be stopped

2007-11-25T21:38:00.000-05:00

When it comes to exposing the danger of the Mike Huckabee candidacy, no one has come close to Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online (h/t - Reason and Revelation). Goldberg's entire column is a takedown of the Huckster, but he really warms to the topic in the middle of the piece:

What’s troubling about The Man From Hope 2.0 is what he represents. Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee’s a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do “good works” extends to using government — and your tax dollars — to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
For example, Huckabee would support a nationwide ban on public smoking. Why? Because he’s on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.

Those readers who have followed this space from the beginning know that for yours truly, nothing is as dangerous as someone who "believes the government should do the right thing." It is the antithesis of limited government. Goldberg notes this as well:

Indeed, Huckabee represents the latest attempt to make conservatism more popular. Contrary to the conventional belief that Republicans need to drop their opposition to abortion, gay marriage and the like in order to be popular, Huckabee understands that the unpopular stuff is the economic libertarianism: free trade and smaller government. That’s why we’re seeing a rise in economic populism on the right married to a culturally conservative populism.

This is why Huckabee spooks Goldberg; in fact, it's why he should spook all of us.

This last year has made abundantly clear a trend that has been in place for some time: the marginalization of the limited government principle within the Republican Party. I focus on 2007 because it was the first chance for the party to notice the consequences of going so badly astray from that principle - namely, losing Congress nationally, and the loss of George Allen locally.

The response was, too say the least, troubling. Richmond Republicans cam up with HB3202, better known as the transportation tax hike of 2007. After voters soundly rejected that silliness, Republicans in eastern Virginia responded by nominating for Congress the only candidate who voted for the political millstone. Finally, nationwide, the man with the momentum is a long-time Arkansas tax-hiker who has insulted the Club for Growth.

Many wonder what a Giuliani nomination would mean for social conservatives. I can understand why, but Giuliani has made it abundantly clear during his campaign that he understands the role social conservatives play in the GOP. Huckabee, by contrast, has made it just as clear that in his Republican party, what is loosely called "economic conservatism" - in fact, the very principle of limited government - has no place.

That is why Huckabee must be stopped. His nomination would split the party in half, and drive away millions of libertarian-leaning Republicans. It would be a painful repeat of the 1992 election, when George H. W. Bush lost these voters over the tax hike of 1990 and never got them back.

What are they smoking?

2007-11-25T20:53:00.000-05:00

Blog News Net has their latest Most Influential Blogs, and in what I'm sure is as much a surprise to everyone else as it was to me, yours truly is #8.

I supposedly had more heft than Bearing Drift, Virginia Virtucon, and Chris over at Mason Conservative.

I must confess, it's quite an enjoyable illusion.

Here comes the first call for a tax increase

2007-11-25T01:26:00.000-05:00

Lowell at Raising Kaine makes the first call for the state government not to reduce its budget, but to force you and Me to reduced ours:

. . . the obvious solution to Virginia's budget problems -- at least in a rational, non-ideological world -- would be to raise revenues (aka, "taxes") . . .

h/t - Brian Kirwan at Bearing Drift.

Keep in mind, the last biennial budget topped $70 billion. If past trends continue, the next budget, the one Lowell insists will have a $1.2 billion deficit, will top $80 billion. Yet we will be told we have to raise spending by $10 billion and except a tax increase, rather than by "merely" $8.5 billion.

Oh, and Lowell, in case your reading this, if you really think the Club for Growth is in control of the House of Delegates, I can only assume you've spent the last three years in a parallel universe.

It is very depressing (but hardly surprising) not to be able to trust Democratic Central

2007-11-24T06:33:00.000-05:00

Blogger cvllelaw is "depressed." The Democratic Central blogger put up what appears to be a heart-rending post about not being able to trust the government in Iraq. In the 15 minutes it's taken me to research the post, I have come to the "depressing" conclusion that I can't trust cvllelaw, or Democratic Central.

I'll let you see c-law's own words:

I have been hearing this week a great deal about what are asserted as facts -- reports that claim that the number of IED attacks, the number of Iraqi casualties, etc. are down. The reports are the basis for the argument that the "surge" was working -- that violence was down, that progress was being made.
I want to believe, but I just can't. The report might well be true, but I have to acknowledge that there is an excellent chance -- maybe even better than 50% -- that it is not only naively wrong but willfully wrong.
My suspicions rise when I read that the military -- after giving out this data for the last 3 1/2 years, has now stopped releasing data on insurgent attacks. Now, all of a sudden, that information is "classified."

C-law cites a T.P. Muckraker post about the Pentagon supposedly withholding data from the General Accounting Office as the source backing up the last assertion. Here's that post, take a look at it and come back here.

. . .

Notice something odd about Muckraker post? As in, the date? As in, the date of the post is December of 2006? A little odd for C-law to notice this now, yes?

Still, being the "trusting" guy I am, I thought it was worth some digging to see if the what was supposedly true last year still holds today.

It doesn't.

For starters, the data C-law and Muckraker insists (or in TP's cases, insisted last year) was being suppressed - late 2006 enemy attack data - is now out for the world to see, including the GAO which has it on page three of its September 28, 2007 report. However, the real nugget of information comes just above the aformentioned chart, beginning at the end of page two and running over to the beginning of page three (emphasis added):

In response to GAO’s requests, various DOD components—most recently the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—have assisted GAO in publicly reporting trends in the security situation by declassifying the attacks data on a monthly basis. In our report on the status of the achievement of Iraqi benchmarks, we provided attacks data through July 31, 2007. This report provides data through August 31, 2007.
While the administration has provided the Congress with aggregated attacks data in DOD’s quarterly reports it is important that the Congress and the American public receive the monthly attacks data routinely from the Department of Defense. We are recommending that DOD make the data publicly available each month in a timely manner.
The updated attacks data we provide in this letter are sufficiently reliable for establishing general trends in the number of enemy-initiated attacks in Iraq.

In other words, what Muckraker assumed was a new attempt by the Defense Department to classify unwelcome information has in fact been standard operating procedure, and the concern the GAO official expressed to him is a long-standing GAO complaint.

More to the point (and I guess it needs repeating), in the GAO's own words: "The updated attacks data we provide in this letter are sufficiently reliable for establishing general trends in the number of enemy-initiated attacks in Iraq."

So the very institution c-law is claiming can't get reliable information (I'm not going to hold T.P. Muckraker responsible for having a year-old post suddenly recycled out of the blue) is calling the very information in question "sufficiently reliable." Sadly, depressingly, we can no longer use that label for any of c-law's posts.

Why we have to stay in Iraq until the 2009 election

2007-11-24T00:43:00.000-05:00

His name is - well, no one is really sure what his name is, but he calls himself Abul Abed (Chicago Tribune via Small Dead Animals). He was a former Iraqi major who "went into business" after the liberation of Iraq began. "He won't say what business," but it's widely assumed he was part of a Sunni anti-American insurgent group.

In time, disgusted with al Qaeda, Abul Abed turned on them, sought American help, and is now the "boss" in the Amariyah neighborhood in Iraq.

It's quite a story, but the key comes at the end, when Abul talks about the future of Iraq:

The real enemy of Iraq, he says, now is Iran. He pulled out his mobile phone to show pictures he has saved of the bodies of his four brothers, who were kidnapped and murdered in 2005 by what he suspects was a Shiite death squad with ties to Iran. One of them had a nail driven into his head. Another was missing a hand.
"Even animals wouldn't do that," he said, his face darkening. "Iran is so deeply infiltrated in Iraq, the problem here still cannot be solved. Iran wants to demolish us. If the Americans leave, then you can count Iraq as a second Tehran."

This in a nutshell explains: 1) Why so many Sunnis joined the insurgency in the first place - namely the fear that we would simply hand the place over to the Iranian mullahs, 2) how the President's new strategy on Iran helped begin to turn folks like Abul to our side, and 3) why we must stay there until the Iranian-tainted government of Nouri al-Maliki is thrown out of office by the Iraqi voters.

The politics of civil rights in the 60s: a revisionist view

2007-11-23T22:28:00.000-05:00

Forty-four years ago today, Lyndon Johnson (hereafter LBJ) began his first full day as President of the United States. As most Americans recognize today, it meant a sea-change in American politics - just not the sea-change they think it was. Of all the myths surrounding the Johnson Administration, the biggest of them involves civil rights.

Just about everyone knows the conventional story of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - LBJ standing up to his fellow southern Democrats, Dixie voters swearing off the Democrats forever, LBJ himself telling his top aide, "I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times" (Karen Davis), etc. It's all designed to make LBJ the political martyr, with the GOP (whose nominee in 1964 opposed the Civil Rights Act) as the villains, and white America as reluctant, recalcitrant, and vaguely intolerant.

There's only one problem with the narrative: it isn't really true. The politics of Civil Rights were far, far more complicated than people today realize, and while what it says about LBJ is debatable, I think it says a lot more about the American people. Ironically, the man who probably knew this more than anyone else was the late LBJ himself.

To get an idea of the actual political reality, we have to literally cast aside the last 44 years of political history. 9/11, Iraq, the Cold War's end, Vietnam (mostly), the Great Inflation, the "Great Society," the "War on Poverty," and of course, the Civil Rights laws that were passed from 1964-1968; all were part of the unknown future. We have to go all the way back to November 23, 1963.

What were the political realities on that day? Almost nothing like today.

For starters, the last time the Republicans won a majority of the African-American vote was in 1956. Today, that's practically ancient history, but to the newly inaugurated LBJ, it was less than a decade ago. There was no guarantee that a GOP nominee wouldn't run to the Democrats' "left" on civil rights (as they had in 1956) and recapture the African-American majority. Even in 1960 - when Robert Kennedy engineered the release of Dr. Martin Luther King from jail - Republican Richard Nixon won over one-third of the African-American vote.

Now, African-Americans weren't voting in nearly enough numbers to matter in most states (largely because they couldn't vote where they would have had the greatest impact - the South), but they would be enough in some of the states that Kennedy won by a whisker in 1960- states such as Pennsylvania (32 electoral votes, margin of victory: 2.32%), Illinois (27 E.V., margin of victory: 0.19%), Michigan (20 E.V., margin: 2.01%), New Jersey (16 E.V., margin: 0.8%), Missouri (13 E.V., margin: 0.52%), Minnesota (11 E.V., margin: 1.43%), New Mexico (4 E.V., margin: 0.74%), Hawaii (3 E.V., margin: .06%), and Delaware (3 E.V., margin: 1.64% - source: Dave Leip, you may have to select 1960 to get to the right data).

That's 129 electoral votes where a shift of 1.25% (one vote in 80) would have reversed the outcome. Even if Johnson could win all 58 Southern electoral votes that had gone to Nixon or "Unpledged" in 1960 (hardly a safe bet), the net addition of 71 electoral votes to the Republicans would give them 290.

This doesn't include either the District of Columbia - which was as overwhelmingly African-American then as it is now, but as mentioned above, that was a competitive constituency back then - and white voters sympathetic to civil rights who may not be comfortable with a Southerner in the White House.

That brings us to another fact. Before November 1963, the last politician to move straight from the South to the White House was Andrew Johnson, who left office in 1869 (the Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson was Governor of New Jersey when he was elected in 1912). Hardly anyone remembered a President from the Old Confederacy (a far cry from the present). There was no guarantee that northern Democrats would automatically support a southerner out of party loyalty.

Finally, there were the Republicans to consider. Again, no one knew Barry Goldwater would oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (he had supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960). More to the point, no one knew Goldwater would be the nominee; in fact, until the Arizona Senator won the California primary in June of 1964, the presumed nominees were New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and the "noncandidate" Richard Nixon.

Rockefeller had a solid civil rights record as Governor of New York, as did Lodge during his time as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Nixon had been Vice President during the Eisenhower Administration, and as such could take some credit for the aforementioned 1957 and 1960 Acts.

Of course, Johnson could also take credit for those acts - he was Senate Majority Leader at the time. However, he was taking over and Administration whose accomplishments on civil rights were an absolute zero. Up against Rockefeller or Nixon, LBJ would have to hear the Republicans campaign as the party of enacting civil rights, and he'd have nothing to show for Democratic governance in the area.

But could the Republicans really pull that off? Once again, remember the time. This is 1963; the Republicans had been the party of civil rights for nearly a century. In fact, the first Democrat to win the African-American vote was Franklin Roosevelt, in 1936. Even then, it was hardly the "lock" it is today (most presumed 1956 was a return to normal Republican dominance of the African-American vote; the 1960 result was a shocking and bitter disappointment for the GOP). Republican politicians just naturally assumed that they had the high ground on civil rights, because for most of American history prior to 1960, they did.

This was the political reality LBJ faced in the late autumn of 1963 - a closely divided nation, an opposition likely to run to his "left" on civil rights, and recalcitrant Dixiecrats who may not support him anyway.

The reality is, embracing and supporting civil rights was not only the right thing to do: it was the politically necessary thing to do; it was the only real shot LBJ had at being elected to a full term. So, he did it. Less than a week after taking over, he pledged his full support for what would be the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a phone conversation with King (Mary Ferrell Foundation).

The rest is history: "We Shall Overcome," Goldwater's stunning opposition to the Act, the LBJ landslide of 1964, etc.

So what are we to make of the real political situation in 1963? Does it say less about LBJ? Some may say so, but I'm not so certain. It would take a sharp political mind to recognize all of the above, and your average politician was not nearly as tactically or strategically smart as (s)he is today. LBJ was unique, though; he was one of the sharpest politicians in his day.

Moreover, even if the right thing is politically advantageous, you still have to do it - and be sincere. Had LBJ just gone through the motions and claimed to support the bill while letting it die in Congress, he could have claimed to be just as good as Rockefeller, Nixon, or Lodge. Instead, he used massive amounts of political capital to turn the bill into an Act of law. Looking back today, we know it was a political winner, but all LBJ had were his instincts and his belief in what was right. That's still pretty heroic to me.

More importantly, what this shows us is something we have long since forgotten: civil rights were a political winner. The American voters - a far whiter group then than now - supported them strongly enough to ensure both parties felt a need to be viewed as the party of civil rights. Goldwater's crushing defeat later proved that.

We have forgotten that in large part because the "civil rights agenda" has gone astray, and become little more than an ethnic power grab cloaked in high-minded rhetoric. In place of Martin Luther King, we have Al Sharpton. Adam Clayton Powell has given way to Charlie Rangel (literally, Rangel beat him in a primary). The erudite Ed Brooke has been replaced by the empty-suit Barack Obama.

Yet there was a time when civil rights actually meant civil rights; the American people understood that, and their newly ascended President acted on that understanding for what was both good politics and good policy. That is the forgotten truth of the civil rights era.

If "Lucky" is conservative, I'll take vanilla

2007-11-23T14:47:00.001-05:00

No one who reads this blog would confuse me for a fan of Bob Wittman. My views on him haven't changed; the only reason he will get my vote on the 11th of December is because I took a pledge to support the nominee when I became a delegate. I have yet to attempt to sell anyone else on him, and that's not going to change.

Having said that, I'll admit to being intrigued when I first heard of "conservative independent" Lucky Narain (On the Spot). The fact that Narain was willing to take aim at Wittman's greatest mistake (HB3202, better known as the transportation tax hike of 2007) further piqued my curiosity. So, I took a look at his issues.

That brought the curiosity to a quick end.

For starters, take a look at the ways in which "Lucky" will reduce the size and scope of government.

. . .

Oops! That's right. There aren't any. Every single time "Lucky" mentions government spending, he wants it increased. Now, increased funds for veterans and highways may be politically popular, and the partial Department of Defense/Department of Veterans Affairs consolidation he proposes might actually be a good idea, but it will hardly cut big government down to size.

Even the "consolidation" idea is a cop-out; a real supporter of limited government would call for the Department of Veterans Affairs to be abolished, with its functions folded into the DoD.

Still, the real coup de grace comes in the "For Families" section:

President Bush's capital gains tax cuts should be made permanent.

Why be so specific, Lucky? What about all the other tax reductions that are due to expire in 2011? No one parses language like that unless their trying to hide something: namely that they don't mind letting the rest of the tax cuts expire and hit the American people with a massive de facto tax hike.

I can understand the desire for a genuine, limited-government conservative alternative to Bob Wittman; I know I'd be looking for one if I hadn't been a delegate at the convention. All the same, Lucky Narain does not fit the bill.

Accidental comedy from the abstinece-only funding debate

2007-11-23T14:25:00.001-05:00

Amidst the brouhaha over Governor Kaine's decision to eliminate state-spending for abstinence-only sex education, State Senator Walter Stosch (yes, the Washington Post misspelled his name) had me in stitches. Here was the quote from the Senate Republican leader who gave us not one, but two tax increases in three years and was actually hoping for a third (emphasis added): "It's a controversial matter, but it's important to conservatives like me."

Next stop for Walter, the Richmond Improv!

Bob Marshall for Senate

2007-11-21T21:27:00.001-05:00

The words I have been waiting to hear for weeks (if not months) have finally been printed (Washington Post):

Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) said today he is considering entering the race for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate.

. . . and the clouds parted as the sun shone through to brighten the land . . .

Seriously, Bob Marshall is now the dean of northern Virginia Republicans (Vince Callahan has retired), and as the party was getting pasted on November 6, he increased his percentage over 2005 (from 55% to 58%). He was also one of the very few Republicans who outpolled his Democratic opponent in Loudoun County (where the GOP was hit especially hard). Not only is he untainted by the stain of HB 3202 (a.k.a. the transportation tax hike of 2007), he was one of the brave few who led the fight against it.

So, he is obviously superior to Chris Saxman, and his record on life issues (for me) puts him ahead of Jim Gilmore (even without Gilmore's very problematic opposition to the surge, which is still a show-stopper for me).

Moreover, FWIW, Delegate Marshall does not have any ordinary district. District 13 is easily the most heavily populated in the state, with over 81,700 registered voters (the nearest one to this is the 33rd, which has 20,000 fewer voters). As such, Marshall has had to campaign almost as hard as any State Senator (their districts average about 110,000).

This really is the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party of Virginia.

So, Delegate Marshall, if you're reading this (and I hope you are) rest assured you will get at least one supporter in the Fredericksburg area.

BOB MARSHALL FOR SENATE!

In the UK, "every parent in the land" is at risk for identity theft now

2007-11-21T12:56:00.001-05:00

The British government's admission that it has lost the personal financial data of 25 million people continues to reverberate. The best synopsis comes from the Spectator (UK) Coffee House (emphasis added):

There were genuine gasps of amazement in the chamber when (Minister) Darling unveiled the scale of this disaster. If you have a child, and receive child benefit, your bank details are right now on the loose. Sort code and account number, together with your address and age of your child – details of 25m people in 7m families: every parent in the land. This data goldmine was downloaded onto two CDs on 18 Oct by a “junior official” (the fact that it’s so easy to do this is, is in itself, an outrage) and sent from HM Revenue Customs & Excise in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London (who say they never asked for such detail in the first place). The CDs never arrived. And no one has a clue where they are.

A couple of initial thoughts:
1) If I'm Gordon Brown, I tell my Labor party cronies to get ready for the next election in 2010 - and then pray the WBK War goes so bad that he can use the World War II precedent and extend Parliament past that date. Why do I say that? Check out this line from the Coffee House's Fraser Nelson: "the British public (feel) . . . raw, visceral hatred towards this government . . . we have just witnessed Labour's Black Tuesday." The last line was a mirrored reference to the Conservative Party's "Black Wednesday," when market forces drove the British currency off the Exchange Rate Mechanism - a moment of spectacular economic mismanagement and political embarrassment that soured British voters toward the Tories and has kept them out of power in every election since.

Black Wednesday was in September of 1992.

2) While most reaction involving government policy has been to hail this is the "death of ID cards," I think we may see a greater revulsion against government programs of all kinds. Keep in mind, this fiasco happened because the British government was collecting data for a public benefit for children - exactly the kind of entitlement program we have here for people of all ages. In this era of electronic transfers, data sharing, and identity theft, the government program that in the past meant "free" money with the vague concern of overreaching government now means an open invitation to becoming a victim of fraud.

Moreover, when the greatest enabler of said fraud is found to be the very folks trusted to keep the data secure, more and more voters may look at the next (or even current) set of entitlement programs the way Dr. McCoy viewed the Genesis project (Thinkers and Jokers):

Spock: "I do not dispute that in the wrong hands--"
McCoy: "'In the wrong hands'? Would you mind telling me whose are the right hands, my logical friend?"

If I'm right (and that's an admittedly big "if"), the welfare state may finally have met its match, and we'll have an incompetent, lefty Labor government to thank for it.

Your (well, their) government at work, losing the personal data of millions

2007-11-21T10:45:00.000-05:00

I can almost hear Leslie Carbone and Rick Sincere screaming in my ears . . .

From "across the pond" in the UK (the news, not the bloggers) courtesy of Brit Tory blogger Iain Dale (emphasis added):

I have a pensions policy and an endowment with Standard Life. I've just heard that the financial details of 15,000 Standard Life customers have been lost by HM Customs & Revenue. On top of this HM Revenue & Customs have lost more personal data in a much wider breach of security. It is scant consolation that the Chairman of HM Revenue & Customs has taken responsibility and resigned. I suppose it is too much to ask for a Treasury Minister to take responsibility too.
UPDATE: Unbelievable. They have lost 7.5 million records relating to child benefit. There has to be political accountability here.

To make matters worse, what wasn't lost was sent via the mail to constituents (Dale again, emphasis added):

I've been contacted by someone who, a few weeks ago, wrote to their MP enclosing a copy of a CD containing confidential information about HMRC Tax Credit Office clients that had been sent in error by HMRC to him.
This person had called HMRC asking for a CD audio copy of telephone conversations they’d had with HMRC when discussing their Tax Credit award. HMRC sent them a CD not only with their recordings but with two hours’ worth of recordings from people right across the country containing bank details, NI Numbers, addresses, phone numbers, details of which schools people’s children went to etc.
I'm told the MP forwarded the letter and CD to a Minister asking if they could ascertain if this was a more widespread problem within HMRC. So far, no reply has been forthcoming.This seems to be further evidence that this misuse of public data is widespread within government.
If HMRC has breached the Data Protection Act then presumably they can be held liable in the courts - by 15 million people... The mind boggles.

As one would expect, it has become a major scandal in Britain, where the Labor government (now under the control of Gordon Brown, and thus a barren field for Bush-haters) is trying to force all Britons to carry national ID cards (on that, Dale chimes in: "Today marks the death knell of identity cards" - I hope and pray he's right).

Dale has quite a few other witty observations on the debacle (here, here, here, here, here, and here) - and for those counting, the number of Britons affected by "lost" data now stands at 25 million (Conservative Home) - but the best quote so far comes from this Dale post:

Ronald Reagan once said that the most frightening sentence in the English language is . . . Trust me, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Never a truer word spoken, especially today.

McGuire's First Rule of Iraqi Politics

2007-11-20T22:46:00.000-05:00

When Nouri al-Maliki rips you by name, you're having a good day (AP via Yahoo):

Iraq's prime minister lashed out at the country's Sunni Arab vice president in an interview published Tuesday, drawing attention to a bitter rift between two key politicians from rival sects at a time the U.S. is pressing for Iraqi unity.

Why is al-Maliki so upset? Here's why:

For months, al-Hashemi has been a sharp and outspoken critic of al-Maliki, accusing him of pursuing pro-Shiite sectarian policies and restricting decision-making inside a small circle of top aides from his Dawa party.

Here's the thing - al-Hashemi is right.

We have to remember, al-Maliki has his job for one reason: the Golden Mosque bombing of 2006. Most remember that incident as the flash-point to a dramatic rise in Iraqi violence. However, that bombing had political consequences, too. The blood from the bombing became the glue that held together the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, and enable the pro-Iranian parties (including al-Maliki's Dawa) to force one of their own into the Prime Minister's job.

Lest anyone forget, al-Hashemi is in the running for Iraq's opposition leader (and alternative candidate for Prime Minister in the 2009 vote); if al-Maliki wasn't in such a weak political position, he'd be much quieter. Remember, Maliki isn't talking about terrorists, here; he is going after a political opposition - one of the most vital ingredients for any democracy (or republic, as I prefer). Far more importantly, al-Maliki is going after al-Hashemi because the latter can lead an anti-Iranian coalition against him in the next election.

The only chance al-Maliki has to defeat al-Hashemi (or the other claimant to the anti-Iranian mantle: Iyad Allawi) is to discredit ans smear him; so that's what he's doing. Whenever a weak incumbent starts "going negative," it's a good sign for the "victim."

Cultures and faith can be vastly different, but politics doesn't change much across borders.

The Quote of the Post-mortem

2007-11-20T16:03:00.001-05:00

From GOP Hokie (author of Elephant Ears):

Until our party looks at the budget like a family, it will get tougher and tougher to get the people to trust us to handle their money.

That's the last sentence in the post. Go back and read the rest of it. Every. Single. Word.

Chris Saxman? I think not.

2007-11-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

It looks like everybody in the blogosphere is jumping on - or at least looking at - the Chris Saxman bandwagon: Mason Conservative, SWAC Girl, Jim Riley at Virginia Virtucon, the folks at Too Conservative . . . even Ben Tribbett (better known as Not Larry Sabato) is getting in on the act (well, sort of).

Will I join the Saxman nomination bandwagon? In a word: No.

Why? My reason is HB3202 (a.k.a. transportation tax hike of 2007).

It is painfully obvious that HB3202 sank the party this fall, the deep denial prevailing over the 1st District convention of two weekends ago notwithstanding.

So how did Delegate Saxman vote on this disaster? Well, he supported it, not once, not twice, but three times.

This is not the candidate we need to run in 2008. In fact, until he repudiates his betrayal of Republican principles, he should not be a candidate for any statewide office.

I know many bloggers will consider me unduly harsh; I can only assume none of them live in Hampton Roads (then again, neither do I, and I understand this).

I had hoped Election Day 2007 - in particular the success of the HB3202 opponents - would clear some eyes and force more Republicans to recognize the danger of becoming just another pro-tax party. It appears the lesson has not taken hold as deeply as it must. How many more elections do we have to lose?

An open letter to Governor Gilmore (UPDATED)

2007-11-19T23:20:00.000-05:00

Governor Gilmore,

While I cannot pretend to know the reaction you expected from your official Senate candidacy announcement (SWAC Girl), I do think it was less than you had hoped (Mason Conservative and Below the Beltway). I expect you are already aware that there are large segments of the local Republican party, including and especially in the blogosphere (Bearing Drift and Mason Conservative) who are convinced that your candidacy will end in failure.

While I have joined them in looking for alternatives, please understand that I do not share their pessimism.

I know that you have been badly smeared, and that based on the facts, your record as Governor is far better than conventional wisdom would have us believe. I also remember how Mark Warner, your successor and likely opponent, raised state spending while claiming to reduce it, then foisted an unnecessary tax on the people of Virginia by leveraging the very Senate squishes you fought tooth and nail at the end of your term.

I remember that you are the last local Republican to carry Fairfax County while leading the GOP ticket.

I genuinely believe that you can help bring the GOP back to its proper role as the home for supporters of limited government. I even think you could do it better than the latest alternative - Chris Saxman, whose record is blighted by his support for HB3202.

My disagreement with you is on a different matter: namely, your July 18, 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post - the op-ed in which you came out against the "surge" in Iraq.

The piece is full of terrible quotes that will be used by Mark Warner to divide us. It was you, not Warner or anyone else, who said this (emphasis added):

American interests come down to protection of our national security, protection of Israel's right to exist, and averting, if possible, a general war in the Middle East, nuclear or otherwise. Our present conduct in Iraq distracts from or is detrimental to those goals.

Can you really expect Republicans to fall in behind a nominee who wrote something this egregious?

Governor, you must address this, and you must address it soon.

It's not too hard to do the right thing and admit that you made a mistake in writing this piece. Voters are used to politicians switching positions and trying to explain how they were just as right then as they are now. It will be a refreshing change for them to see a politician with the guts to say, "I was wrong."

In fact, such an action may be just what many Virginians need to take their own second look on Iraq, and see the progress that has been made since the beginning of this year.

If you do this, you will find the Republican party united behind you, should you win the nomination. Furthermore, for what it's worth (and to you, it may not be much), if you acknowledge that this op-ed was a mistake, I will support your bid for the GOP nomination (UPDATE: unless Bob Marshall decides to run, in which case, I'm his man). If not, I cannot support you in the nomination process, and while I will support you in the general election, I will not expect you to win.

While I may be one of the very few to make my concerns public, I know I am not the only person who has them. You spooked a lot of us, Governor, with that op-ed piece; only by repudiating it, and acknowledging you were wrong, can you win us back.

Yours Truly,

D.J. McGuire: the right-wing liberal

GOP Hokie gets it half-right

2007-11-18T20:37:00.000-05:00

GOP Hokie (author of Elephant Ears) has taken stock of the litany of post-mortems coming out of Election Day 2007. G-H has some good points and some bad errors.

Let's start with the good stuff. G-H has the best synopsis of the state of the right here in Virginia (sic): "The key I think to this arguement is not whether conservativism wins; but what 'conservatism' really is."

It doesn't take long, however, for the post to go awry: "It is a proven fact that areas like NOVA are in fact pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-higher taxes (depending on the reason)." Pro-higher taxes? That may come as a surprise to live NOVA voters who thunderously rejected a sales-tax hike in 2002. As for the region's history of support for tax-hiking Democrats, keep in mind that the only alternative they have seen up there are high-tax Republicans or equivocators like Jerry Kilgore. Anti-tax Republicans did quite well up there on November 6.

G-H then improves the post thusly:

In order to win, conservatism has to be a true limited government platform. We can be socially conservative, but we have to be more than that. We have to oppose spending increases and look for ways to streamline government . . . The GOP is currently suffering from a contradictory stance on our economic policy. We favor "limited government", but have grown the budget more than the dems.

That describes the party's problem in a nutshell. Unfortunately, G-H then misses the point: "The problem is that the GOP isn't the party of limited government, its the party of lower taxes."

No, G-H, the problem is that the Republicans are not the party of lower taxes in the minds of Virginia voters. In fact, the voters can't tell the difference between the parties on taxes or spending. This is what sank the GOP.

G-H makes another critical mistake in examining the two Senate races where GOP incumbent squishes were defeated in the primaries:

Stall and Smith ousted their opponents largely on their support of the '04 tax increase, but neither of those (or any of the other primary challengers) campaigned on trying to roll back that tax increase. How can you expect the general electorate to believe you, when you don't even oppose the one thing you are accusing your primary opponent of doing?

In fact, Smith's opponent (Brandon Bell) opposed the 2004 tax hike, it was the transportation tax hike of 2007 that Bell supported. This was also Stall's chief weapon against Marty Williams.

Why does this matter? Because by focusing on the Warner tax-hike, GOP Hokie misses the whole story of Election 2007. That doesn't really surprise me, given that the Shenandoah Valley was not deeply affected by it. However, in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, HB3202 was Issue #1. Voters seethed at the fools who foisted it on them - and the voters knew those fools were Republicans.

So, the voters took it out on Republicans - all Republicans who supported it (including Cuccinelli, who is currently mired in a recount, and Holtzman-Vogel, who was held below 50%). The key here is to look at the Republicans who did not support HB3202, in particular the four Delegates with anti-tax records who voted against it. Three out of four improved on their 2005 margin of victory, while the fourth (Mark Cole) "fell" from 62.5% to 62.1%.

Sadly, the Warner tax hike did not crystallize voter anger at higher taxes, but HB3202 did. For GOP Hokie not to see that undermines - and nearly invalidates - the good points made.

Howell survives, more's the pity

2007-11-18T20:05:00.000-05:00

It looks like Bill Howell will be House Speaker once more (Mason Conservative). Hold on to your wallets, folks; we could have a huge tax increase next year.

Of course, it is possible that the Speaker learned his lesson, and will cease and desist from the nonsense like HB3202 (a.k.a. the transportation tax hike of 2007). If so, I'll happily eat some crow.

If not, though, then the party will continue to drift, our taxes will go up, and the Democrats are likely to sweep in 2009 (including a possible majority in the House of Delegates). Will it take a complete wipeout for the GOP to come to its senses and become the party of lower taxes and limited government again?

Meanwhile, some Republicans STILL don't get it

2007-11-17T23:01:00.000-05:00

Sadly, for each good Republican like Bob Marshall, there are legions of them who simply don't understand what happened to the party on November 6. Exhibit One, about which I posted at length last weekend, was the majority of delegates at the 1st District GOP convention who chose the tax-hiking Rob Wittman as the party's nominee for Congress. Exhibit Two is one Zachary D. Moore, aide to outgoing State Senator Brandon Bell (who was defeated in a Republican primary by the only person in the Senate I will trust - Senator-elect Ralph Smith). Moore took aim at us right-wingers (in particular Smith), in the Manassas Journal-Messenger.

Jim Bacon took aim at some of Moore's musings, but Bell's aide made plenty more erroneous assertions, starting with this "explanation" for how the Democrats won control of the state senate:

More than any other issue, Republican infighting allowed the Democrats to take control.

Really, Zach? Are you trying to tell us that HB3202 (better known as the transportation tax hike of 2007 ) had nothing to do with it? Try telling that to Jay O'Brien, who was hammered over and over again for his support for HB3202 while Bob Marshall, whose district partially overlaps O'Brien's, actually improved over his 2005 percentage because he opposed it.

Moore compounds his mistake - and gets personal while he's at it - in the next paragraph:

The 2007 primary races severely damaged our party in two ways. First, the fighting within our party has created division amongst party activists and demoralized our base. The race to succeed incumbent Sen. Brandon Bell in the 22nd district illustrates this point. Bell won this seat in 2003 by 5,695 votes. Ralph Smith won this year by a margin of 749 votes. That's nearly 5,000 voters that switched their vote from Republican to Democrat. It stands to reason that the primary contest between Bell and Smith was the most likely reason for the switch.

Once again, Moore misses the point. In 2003, his boss (Bell) could portray himself as a low-tax, limited-government conservative. Since then, he supported both HB3202 (here's the vote) and a massive tax increase in 2006. Something tells me that Bell would have bled voters in much the same way Jay O'Brien and Ken Cuccinelli did.

So, having largely fouled up recent political history, Moore moves on to mess up election finances:

The 2007 primary races also damaged our party by using up a tremendous amount of resources that would normally be used against the opposition. The numbers are staggering. Senate incumbents Bell, Emmett Hanger, Walter Stosch and Marty Williams raised over $2 million to secure their party nominations. That's $2 million that was used to defend their seats against other Republicans instead of Democrats.
General election races in the 1st and 6th Senate districts show the dramatic impact of the infighting. In the 6th Senate district, incumbent Nick Rerras was ousted by Democrat Ralph Northam. Senator Rerras was outspent nearly 2 to 1. There simply wasn't enough money for him to compete with his Democratic challenger, who raised over a $1 million. Senator Rerras could certainly have used the money spent in the primaries.

That all sounds very compelling, except for the fact that there are no campaign finance limitations in Virginia. The $2 million spent by the incumbents listed in no way prevented the party from finding the general election money Rerras needed so badly (I should add that Rerras also voted for HB3202).

Moore goes on to talk about the damage done to the "Republican social agenda" while insisting Marty Williams would have been unopposed had he defeated Tricia Stall in the primary, and then piously insisting Republicans "have only ourselves to blame" for all of this.

What makes this rant so important - if maddening - is what Moore doesn't discuss. There is not one word about the Warner tax increase of 2004, which would not have been possible without the cooperation of several Senate Republican tax-hikers; HB3202 is also absent from Moore's piece. In fact, Moore never mentions taxes or economic issues at all.

Moore can't simply be ignorant of the tax issue; his boss lost to Ralph Smith in the GOP primary specifically over taxes. The only logical explanation is that Moore is in deep denial about what ails the party. If the leadership suffer from the same denial, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

More from the should-be Speaker

2007-11-17T22:45:00.000-05:00

Bob Marshall has released a resolution expressing no confidence in Bill Howell et al (courtesy Virginia Virtucon):

Delegate Bob Marshall will offer a resolution of “No Confidence” in the House Republican Caucus tomorrow, Sunday November 18, where Republican delegates will select the Speaker, the Majority Leader, Whip, and Caucus Chair.
Resolution No._______
Expressing a sense of no confidence in the policies of the current House Republican Leadership as pursued from 2002 to the present, and urging a change in policy.
In the House Republican Caucus
Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Mr. Marshall, (Bob), for himself,
RESOLUTION
Expressing a sense of no confidence in the policies of the current House of Delegates Republican Leadership as pursued from 2002 to the present, and urging a change in policy.
Whereas even though the House Republican Caucus was in charge of the 2001 Delegate Redistricting, Republican Caucus strength has decreased from 67 (65 R, 2-Ind.) to 55 members (53-R, 2-Ind.) in the four and one half years of the present House leadership since the Summer of 2002; and Whereas The Republican leadership has failed to pursue efficient government spending by:
1. Including in the 2008 budget nearly $50 million for a Fine Arts Museum in Richmond while at the same time proposing Abusive Driver Fees as a necessary component of the state road funding;
2. Refusal to demand fiscal accountability from Governor Warner by ignoring the will of the House in failing to follow up on properly passed resolutions seeking an accounting by Governor Warner and his Cabinet on implementing the recommendations of the 2002 Wilder Commission report on Efficiency and Effectiveness in Government Spending. (See HR 12 approved 61-35, March 1, 2004, requesting Gov. Warner’s Cabinet to disclose the efficiency and cost savings
measures adopted pursuant to the Wilder Report and other efficiency measures; and HR 13 approved 62-33, March 1, 2004 requesting the Governor to provide the House with detailed facts relating to implementing the Wilder Report.)
3. Allowing government spending to increase at new record levels of spending without making road and transit improvements a priority, and instead providing for tax increases by appointed governmental agencies as provided in HB 3202 (2007);
Whereas The Republican Leadership makes policy decisions in a small closed group and in a secretive manner without benefit of wide Caucus input or knowledge and in late 2006 prepared a transportation bill which Caucus members were expected to accept without discussion or critical input, i.e. HB 3202, which bill placed the responsibility for increasing taxes on appointed officials selected by statute, and included a first time ever tax on services, a tax on home sales during a declining housing market, and enacted severe Abusive Driver Fee penalties; and which violated the principles of George Mason’s Declaration of Rights and Magna Charta (1215) that citizens “cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for public uses without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected.” (Contrast this with the unprecedented claim supported by the Governor, the Attorney General and the Speaker of the House that, “The General Assembly’s ability and power to delegate taxation is not constrained.”); and
Whereas The Republican Leadership has failed to act in a Parliamentary manner by:
1. Accepting the Budget proposed by Governor Warner in 2003 which included both revenue spending measures and revenue raising measures in violation of the Single Object Provision of the Virginia Constitution rather than return the budget to Governor Warner and inform him
that tax and spending measures may not be combined in a single bill.
2. Directing House staff to not record for the public the Privileges and Elections Committee vote on HB 2797 taken on 2-2-07, while making NO objection to all other measures reported from this same committee on the same day until strenuous objection was made insisting on the normal practice of the House, the requirements of Rule 18, and the problems this would produce for the expeditious discharge of business then pending before the House of Delegates; and
Whereas The Republican Leadership has compromised and sought to coerce the independent judgment of Caucus members and their commitment to constituents by using the authority of office to advocate, urge and insist that certain Republican members of the House Finance Committee relent in their opposition to what became the 2004 sales tax increase. Such actions are inconsistent with principled opposition to tax increases; and
Whereas The Republican Leadership has adopted the practices which it criticized Democrats for using, namely failing to appoint sponsors and publicly recognized advocates of legislation as members of House-Senate Conference Committees in at least the instances of the Constitutional Marriage Amendment in 2005 and the Transportation Trust Fund Constitutional Amendment in 2007; Now, therefore be it,
Resolved, that because of the above concerns and the distinct likelihood that the new majority Democratic Senate leadership will propose an unjustified growth in the size of government, increased government spending, and the imposition of new taxes and other policies at variance with Republican principles, that the House Republican Caucus has lost confidence in the policies
of the present Republican Leadership, and request that a new policy direction be undertaken consistent with traditional Republican principles.

The only thing missing from this is a declaration of candidacy for Speaker. C'mon, Bob, take the plunge.

Let's hear it for Joe Blackburn

2007-11-16T21:23:00.000-05:00

The man "who made the Senate Majority Leader, Walter Stosch spend $1m to win his primary by 200 votes" (James Atticus Bowden, the should-be Congressman) has penned a terrific letter to his Delegate calling for the replacement of Speaker Bill Howell.

Here it is in full:

Dear John:
Three years ago, I expressed to you my disappointment that you "took a walk" from a committee vote that enabled the biggest tax increase in Virginia's history to get out of committee. You told me then that the Speaker felt the issue was important enough to justify a floor vote but that he had the votes to defeat it. A few days later, the House of Delegates passed the biggest tax increase in Virginia's history, and a Democratic Governor, who had campaigned on a promise not to raise taxes, signed it into law. As a result, he received national attention and is now the front runner for the U.S. Senate.
This weekend you will be meeting with fellow Republican Delegates to elect leaders of the Republican Caucus. The events of three years ago show that the current Speaker either had a secret deal with Chicester and other members of the Gang of Five in the Senate or that he simply could not count votes. In either case, it shows that he was and is a very poor leader.
Events since that tax increase vote also demonstrate a lack of leadership in our party. My wife tells me that while working the polls with you on election day, you were attempting to defend the indefensible, that being HB-3202. Not only is that bill seriously flawed from a Constitutional standpoint, it is obviously a disaster politically. The leadership of the Senate and House crafted it in an effort to maintain a majority in both chambers, not to promote good government. Not only did the Republican party lose the Senate, it continues its downward spiral in the House. If the trend continues, maintaining the current leadership will result in the loss of control of the House in two years.
Republicans are disgusted with our party leaders straying from its principles, and their disgust is shown by the election results. We need new leadership in our party, and as my Delegate, I
hope you will lead an effort this weekend to promote a change in leadership in the House Republican Caucus. Please don't "take a walk" again.
Sincerely yours,
Joe Blackburn

The only thing Blackburn neglected to do was mention the alternative, Bob Marshall.

Ken Cuccinelli for Minority Leader? (UPDATED)

2007-11-15T14:18:00.000-05:00

The blogosphere is all abuzz about a possible change in Senate leadership (BVBL, Mason Conservative, and Bearing Drift) - UPDATE: Bacon's Rebellion and SWAC Girl have also chimed in - and the first name on everyone's lips is Fairfax's Ken Cuccinelli.

Now, "Cooch" has all the right enemies, and for four years he had an unblemished history. Sadly, when push came to shove last spring, he buckled - and voted for the transportation tax hike of 2007 (here's the vote).

Thus, "Cooch" is a squish.

In fact, every single Republican Senator and Senator-elect either supported or supports that boondoggle (here's Holtzman-Vogel's endorsement, courtesy Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce), except one: Senator-elect Ralph Smith. Now, if he ran for Minority Leader . . .

Amidst the whirl and rush of good news, I'm growing more cautious on Iraq

2007-11-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

There was a time (last spring), when I was one of the few who repeatedly posted bringing up good news from Iraq. These days, purveyors of good news seem to come a dime a dozen (albeit only in the blogosphere, as Victor Davis Hanson notes in National Review Online, MSM has suffered "abrupt amnesia about Iraq"). So, of course, I'm starting to worry, and I fear I have good reason to do so.

Oddly enough, my concern comes from two places I don't implicitly trust: the Washington Post and the International Crisis Group. Let's start with the Post:

Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.

Now, first of all, the fact that military officers are even saying this (and, in fact, the Post quoted several who did) is a testament to our military success there (which the Post, of course, chose not to emphasize). However, it does point straight at the one link in the Iraqi liberation that I have always considered the weakest: the Maliki government.

Readers of this space know well my distaste for Maliki and his crew, his presence in Iraqi politics is the main reason I want American troops in country until at least the next Iraqi election. Maliki has too much of a history with the mullahcracy of Iran, as do his buddies in the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council.

This matters because, IMHO, half the reason we have been so successful in the Sunni parts of Iraq was in response to President Bush's new strategy, which in part included confronting Tehran's infiltration. The Sunnis who have come on board trust us to stand up to Tehran, but I doubt they trust Maliki's United Iraqi Alliance (I sure don't).

So what has the Post found? Several military officers frustrated at the Iraqi government for refusing to reach out to the Sunnis in the recently reclaimed areas. Brigadier General John Campbell was particularly scathing:

Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, deputy commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, complained last week that Iraqi politicians appear out of touch with everyday citizens. "The ministers, they don't get out," he said. "They don't know what the hell is going on on the ground." Campbell noted approvingly that Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, the top Iraqi commander in the Baghdad security offensive, lately has begun escorting cabinet officials involved in health, housing, oil and other issues out of the Green Zone to show them, as Campbell put it, "Hey, I got the security, bring in the [expletive] essential services."

Amidst the potshots fired at the military from the State Department, and a discussion of post-denoument issues, two themes come through: the need for provincial elections (locals need to turn their recent empowerment on the streets against al-Qaeda into lefitimate power at the polls; sadly, it's not happening yet, and it needs to happen) and the reality of the "Shiite-led" government refusing to extend the hand of friendship to the Sunnis.

Now, this is not really a problem if the Sunnis and non-Tehran-backed Shiites believe America has their back. Contrary to some of the alarmist quotes in the Post, I think an America dedicated to kicking Iran out of Iraq could keep these folks onside until the critical November 2009 election.

Unfortunately, Washington seems to have missed the memo when it comes to the SIIC. This is where the International Crisis Group comes in (via Reuters):

The Bush administration's courtship of the biggest Shi'ite party in Iraq could worsen a dangerous rift between rival Shi'ite groups and ultimately give Iran a greater political role, a think tank said on Wednesday.
The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC, a cornerstone of the political alliance behind Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has enjoyed close relations with Washington since the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, unlike the rival Shi'ite movement led by anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr.
But the International Crisis Group urged the United States to adopt a more evenhanded approach to the majority Shi'ite community, saying in a report that Shi'ite rivalries are likely to have more influence on Iraq's future than the sectarian conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis.
"The U.S. has fully backed (SIIC) in this rivalry. This is a risky gambit," the Belgium-based think tank said.
It warned that U.S. reliance on fighters from SIIC's Badr Organization as a counterweight to Sadr's Mehdi Army militia is "bound to backfire, polarizing the Shi'ite community and creating the foundations for endemic intra-Shi'ite strife."

Now, I don't for a moment subscribe to the hidden ICG message - that we have to be nicer to the Sadrists - but the larget notion about the SIIC is dead-on. ICG also notes that SIIC's main sponsor is not us, but Tehran.

That said, there are anti-Iranian Shiites in Iraq. On the secular side, there is former PM Iyad Allawi, while more religious Shia can go with the Fadheela Party. Maddeningly, Washington, which has managed to get so much else right over the last year or so, is still trying to prop up SIIC, if the ICG is to be believed.

Again, provincial elections could help here. Fadheela has a political power base in Basra, and an elected Fadheela government there could permanently break Tehran's hold on the Shiite political elite; odds are, this is the real reason why provincial elections have not stalled.

I have always believed the Iraqi people, when given a chance, will reject Tehran-tainted parties (in 2005, the UIA was much larger than it is now, and included anti-Tehran parties who left after it was clear SIIC and Maliki's Dawa Party were running the show), but they need to know about each other first. If the current Iraqi government won't play ball, we need to bring together our Sunni allies with the anti-Iranian Shiites and help build the broad, democratic coalition that can - and must - throw Maliki's minions out of office in 2009.

If we don't, we will lose all that we have gained. Tehran will have a new satellite state, and the Sunnis will return to the gun. It doesn't have to be like that, but it may be if we don't get our act together help the Iraqis expunges Tehran's agents - military and political.

To all who read this, please sign the Cantor for Senate petition

2007-11-14T12:25:00.000-05:00

Familiar readers already know my grave concerns with Jim Gilmore as the would-be Republican nominee for Virginia's U.S. Senate seat.

Well, Jim Hoeft (Bearing Drift: note, Jim's problems with Gilmore are not mine) and the Mason Conservative are starting an online petition to encourage Congressmen Eric Cantor to take the plunge and run for the Senate. The odds may be long, but when did that stop me before?

I have signed, and I ask you to sign, too.

Bob Marshall for Speaker

2007-11-13T22:17:00.000-05:00

It appears Delegate Bob Marshall is not going to take the Republicans' transformation into a tax-hiking party laying down anymore (Washington Post Virginia Politics Blog):

. . . at least one delegate, Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), said today he plans to force a debate Sunday on whether Howell should be replaced. Marshall blames Howell for costing the GOP House seats because House leaders pushed for last year's transportation package, which included controversial fees on bad drivers and new taxes in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.
"There could be some fireworks," Marshall said of the caucus meeting, which is to be held at Republican Party headquarters in Richmond. "I intend to raise questions about the flawed policy that put us in this circumstance."
In the spring, Howell lobbied for the transportation package by arguing it would help GOP delegates in Northern Virginia win reelection.
"Well it didn't happen. Now what?" Marshall asked. "Do we still go with the same captain? Same hip? Same course? I don't think so. Something has got to change."

Indeed, something does.

Sadly, not everyone has gotten the memo. Patrick Ruffini, for example (via Mason Conservative):

First: It’s time to fire the consultants who ran the same ImmigrationTaxesImmigrationTaxes cookie cutter race in every district, using the same message that killed Jerry Kilgore in Northern Virginia two years ago.

Jerry Kilgore ran against tax hikes? With all due respect to Mr. Ruffini, in what parallel universe did he witness that campaign?

Of course, he's not the only one. Coming on the heels of the party's pasting on Tuesday, none other than Delegate Harvey Morgan was whispering to folks at Saturday's convention that the anti-tax Paul Jost was emblematic of candidates "too far to the right" (Daily Press) - never mind that Jost's message was the only one that survived Tuesday's wreckage (Post blog again):

Marshall noted that most GOP House members from Northern Virginia who supported the transportation package saw their margins of victory decrease in this year's election compared to two years ago. But the Northern Virginia Republicans who voted against the transportation plan - Marshall and Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William) - saw their vote totals increase compared to two years ago.
"They can't blame this on George Bush," Marshall said. "George Bush wasn't out there raising taxes."

The folks who imposed tax-hiking Rob Wittman on us don't want to hear this. They'd rather mock Frederick (whose principled stand transformed his seat from nail-bitingly competitive to a stone-cold, lead-pipe lock) for cracking his voice on the convention floor. However, there are still some of us, such as Marshall, Frederick, and Leslie Carbone, who know full well what needs to be done.

We have no time to lose; the Dems are already planning a major tax increase (see BVBL for more), and we need leadership in the House of Delegates that is ready to withstand the virulent attacks from MSM, stand up to Governor Kaine and incoming Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, and reject every single tax increase that rears its ugly head.

Marshall himself expressed no desire to challenge Howell himself, but that challenge is needed all the same.

Bob Marshall for House Speaker.

Have local Republicans learned NOTHING?!

2007-11-10T23:10:00.000-05:00

Well, just under an hour ago, the 1st District Republican convention nominated Delegate Rob Wittman for Congress. I cannot describe what a colossal mistake my fellow convention delegates made.

Now, my candidate, Jim Bowden, didn't make it past the third ballot, and there were several good candidates in the race (I eventually settled on Paul Jost). Yet somehow, the delegates decided to nominate a politician whose most substantive action in Richmond was to support the transportation tax hike of 2007, the very piece of legislation that helped crush the party this past Tuesday.

The delegates may not have noticed (or even cared) but Hampton Roads is still seething from the regional authority and sky-high driver fees that came from the debacle. Two Hampton Roads seats in both the Senate and the House flipped over to the Democrats in reaction.

None of that mattered to the delegates.

I am left to wonder: when did the Republicans become a party of higher taxes and profligate spending? Did I mess the memo? Was I out of the room? Don't these people have any idea of the damage they are doing?!

Rob Wittman is going to get crushed in Hampton Roads, and his support in the Fredericksubrg area is also likely to be weak (I, as a delegate, made a pledge to vote for him in the general election, but I doubt I will do much of anything else). This seat is now very, very competitive.

Meanwhile, even if Wittman wins, what then? He taxes his tax hiking record to Congress, while his seat opens up again for the man who held it for six years: the tax-hiking Al Pollard.

Honestly, this is as dejected as I have ever been about the fate of the party. No organization can solve this; no candidate recruitment effort can solve this. The Republican Party is facing an identity crisis.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Virginia Republicans must become the party of small government and low taxes again. If not, we will continue to lose, and more to the point, we will deserve to lose. Tonight, the party took a huge step backwards.

Can I sign that open letter, Chris?

2007-11-08T08:14:00.000-05:00

Chris Beer, a.k.a. The Mason Conservative, cyberpens a heartfelt open letter to Rep. Eric Cantor asking him to "Please reconsider your decision not to run for the United States Senate."

Rep. Cantor, for what it's worth, I join Chris in this request.

Myth and reality from the Virginia election

2007-11-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

Last night's vote brought several myths out into the open - myths that must be debunked if the Republicans are ever going to recover here; for only when these myths are put to pasture does it become clear what actually happened last night.

Myth: The era of Virginia as a Republican state is coming to an end.
Fact: The era of Virginia as a Republican state never really began. Until 1998, the Republican Party never - ever - held a legislative majority in either house. The dominant party in the first two-thirds of Virginia's 20th century was the Democrats, buoyed by the economic conservatism and limited government policies of the Byrd machine (racial discrimination helped, but by the time that was dismantled in the legal and voting realms, African-Americans had left the Republicans for the Democrats). It wasn't until the 1999 election that the GOP won numerical majorities in both houses, and even then the House of Delegates was still organized under a bipartisan agreement that split committee memberships and chairmanships. True Republican control of the House didn't begin until 2002; less than a week later, Mark Warner was inaugurated.

In reality, Virginia has been a competitive state for forty years, with the Republicans doing better by and large at the Presidential level and Democrats doing better by and large at the local level. Senators, Congressional delegations, and Governors have gone back and forth over four decades. The notion of a natural Republican majority in Virginia was and always has been a fiction.

Myth: Social conservatism can no longer win elections in Virginia.
Fact: Social conservatism could never win elections in Virginia, at least not by itself. How many avowed pro-lifers have been elected Governor of Virginia since Ronald Reagan made abortion a major political issue in 1980? Answer: zero. George Allen and Jim Gilmore took partial pro-life positions, while Mark Earley - the last full-fledged pro-life nominee for Governor - lost in 2001. Now, this is not to say social conservatism has been rejected by Virginians; after all, Earley himself was elected Attorney General in 1997. However, Republicans had to be more than just social conservatives in order to win. Earley, for example, was an able attorney and a terrific candidate in 1997. Mike Farris, by contrast, hampered himself by refusing to borrow money needed to get his message out (I should note that to this day, voting for Farris for Lieutenant Governor in 1993 was the vote of which I am the most proud to have cast in my entire life).

Myth: Economic conservatism was rejected in Virginia.
Fact: Where it was on the ballot, economic conservatism was embraced in Virginia. My earlier post on this has the details, but suffice to say, Republicans who stood against higher taxes (including those endorsed by their own leadership) actually did better in 2007 than in 2005. This was especially true in northern Virginia, the GOP's supposed electoral desert. Even in the two Hampton Roads Senate seats that the GOP lost, the anti-tax conservative (Tricia Stall) came closer to victory than the pro-tax incumbent (Nick Rerras).

Myth: Virginians are not interested in candidates opposing Democratic plans for higher spending.
Fact: Virginians couldn't find candidates opposing Democratic plans for higher spending. The aforementioned anti-tax Republicans I mentioned were only four - out of nearly 80 Republican legislators. The remaining 70-odd voted for one or another tax increase (and yes, that includes Ken Cuccinelli - whom I still consider a squish). As for the two economic right-wingers who knocked off squish incumbents, one (Stall) nearly won, and the other (Ralph Smith in Roanoke/Salem) did win.

Myth: Northern Virginia is a Democratic bulwark that only tax-hiking Republicans can resist.
Fact: Tax-hiking Republicans went down in droves while anti-tax GOPers survived. See the two Myth-Fact pairs above.

Myth: Economic conservatism has no political support in "blue" areas.
Fact: Economic conservatism won the day in New Jersey and Oregon. These two states haven't given electoral votes to Republicans in almost twenty years, yet New Jerseyans sent a bond issue for a sure-fire cultural lefty favorite (embryonic stem- cell research) to the bottom of the Delaware Bay, while Oregonians, when asked to enact a mini-SCHIP just like the one President Bush vetoed last month, tossed it into the Pacific Ocean. Republicans willing to talk about low taxes and limited government can win in those states. They can win in northern Virginia, too.

Myth: Next year's Senate race is critical for the GOP.
Fact: The 2009 Governor's race is critical for the GOP. Federal races have their own rhythm and issue set, and next year's Senate and Presidential races will be no different. Mark Warner may be doing well now, but just wait until he has to face the fork in the road of rejecting the successful surge in Iraq or bringing down the wrath of his own base (unless the Republicans nominate Gilmore, whose own weakness on Iraq would neutralize that GOP advantage). Lest anyone forget, the Virginia Democratic Party was far healthier at the local level in the 1980s that it is today, and the Republicans still crushed them at the Presidential level.

That said, the Governor's race may be make or break for Republicans over the next decade. Unless the party has a nominee without the blemishes of supporting a tax increase, it will lose its third gubernatorial election in a row, and could very well put the House of Delegates at risk. Meanwhile, without a reckoning on the tax issue, the GOP establishment here could be adrift for years.

This means - as much as it hurts to say it - that neither Bill Bolling nor Bob McDonnell are acceptable for 2009. We need a candidate who has not supported any of the recent tax hikes. That leaves us with the four gentlemen I mentioned here, Gilmore, George Allen, or some others I'm just not remembering right now.

Myth: The Virginia Republicans must move to the center in order to win.
Fact: The Virginia Republicans must return to the economic right in order to win. The Republican Party in Virginia has indeed lost its way, but what it has forgotten is the low-tax, limited-government philosophy that gave its opponents (the Byrd Democrats) near-total domination in Virginia for decades, but then made it competitive when the Dems abandoned the Byrd machine.

Virginia Republicans must become the party of small government and low taxes again. If not, we will continue to lose, and more to the point, we will deserve to lose.

And elsewhere in the country . . .

2007-11-07T18:37:00.000-05:00

For those of you out there who still think right-wing economics and limited government are passé, consider these two bits of news.

In New Jersey, a state that has gone heavily Democratic, a bond measure to borrow $450 million for stem cell research (including embryonic) went down in flames (Bloomberg). Even the Democrats who run the state admitted their profligate history had a lot to do with the culturally left-wing Garden Staters shooting down the bond issue.

Meanwhile, a proposal for a statewide carbon copy of SCHIP - right down to being funded by a cigarette tax - was rejected by nearly 60% of the voters in - wait for it - Oregon (The Oregonian), which hasn't gone "red" since Ronald Reagan's re-election.

So, two culturally left-wing states soundly reject economic leftism, but we're supposed to believe Republicans have no shot at winning over voters in northern Virginia unless they support massive tax increases.

Can you say "disconnect"?

The anti-tax "extremists" actually had a good night

2007-11-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

UPDATED AND BUMPED:

Amidst the wreckage of yesterday's vote in Virginia (and this won't be my last post on the subject), we're already hearing from the squishes that got us into this mess in the first place with the transportation tax hike. State Senator Ken Stolle got the ball rolling for the "centrist" spin in the Washington Post:

If you want to take a look at who's winning in the Republican Party, it's middle-of-the-road Republicans who have not moved too far to the right that they're considered extremists.

Is that so? Let's take a look at those "extremists," shall we?

Keep in mind, Stolle is really talking about any Republican with the gall to oppose the tax increases of 2004 and 2007. There were, in fact, only four GOPers (and one Democrat - Johnny Joannou) who were in this elite class: Mark Cole, Jeff Frederick, Bob Marshall, and Tom Gear.

While the Republicans as a whole lost control of the Senate, and dropped 3 seats in the House of Delegates, here's how the "extremists" did:

Cole - The only one in the bunch whose support fell from 2005. Despite facing a challenger with a quarter-million dollar war chest, Cole lost less than one-third of one percent and "slipped" to a mind-boggling 62%.

Frederick - Elected by the skin of his teeth in 2005 (51%), Frederick had a gigantic bulls-eye painted on him. UPDATED: Yet the "glib extremist" gained a whopping seven-and-a-half points, and was re-elected with over 58% (thanks to BullElephant for catching my earlier error).

Gear - He faced his first opponent in 2005, and crushed him 3 to 2. Yet after defying his party leadership to vote against higher taxes, the Democrats responded to this "extreme" action by giving him a pass and not running anyone against him.

Marshall - His defeat has long been the wet dream of every Virginia Democrat and Washington Post editor, and after losing the Loudoun part of his district in 2005, the dream looked achievable in 2007. Instead, he bucked the party trend in Loudoun and narrowly carried his precincts there. His base in Prince William also came through, leading to a gain of three points to 58%.

Meanwhile, Joannou (unopposed both then and now) actually gained two points over assorted write-ins - quite a feat considering the nasty primary he survived that left a lot of angry liberals.

In other words, in those rare places in Virginia where true right-wing economic policy was on the ballot, it won. More to the point, by and large, it did better this year than it did two years ago.

It would behoove us to remember this next year, when Governor Kaine will almost certainly call for a tax increase.

The 2008 Presidential race has its first official What-the-&(*%! moment

2007-11-07T10:34:00.000-05:00

Pat Robertson just endorsed Rudy Giuliani (New York Times).

Crow makes an excellent midnight snack

2007-11-06T22:58:00.000-05:00

I'll get to lessons learned and what's next tomorrow or later in the week, but suffice to say, my predictions were way, way, off.

Sad to say, this follows a long list of precedents when it comes to predicting elections in my home country.

It's prediction time

2007-11-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

The voting begins in a little more than six hours; all that's left are the sample ballots, the striking of names from the voting lists, the phone calls to voters who haven't reached the polls yet, and the counting.

Well, there is also the matter of predictions.

So here's mine.

State Senate: I'll focus on the key races as I see them.
The surprise that shouldn't be: I cannot understand why so many people think Jay O'Brien is going down. Prince William's base is practically on fire. The Fairfax portion of his district is, of course, in Fairfax, but it's western Fairfax; the most Republican part of the county. I'm going out on a limb here in the eyes of most, but I'm confident that Jay O'Brien is re-elected.

Now, a Republican incumbent Senator will be defeated in northern Virginia; Jeannemaire Devolites-Davis loses, while Ken Cuccinnelli survives. JDD's loss is countered when Bob FitzSimmonds sinks Charles Colgan.

Down in Hampton Roads, Nick Rerras and Tricia Stall win. Stall's strength is in her grateful Republican base. Meanwhile, Ralph Smith holds the Roanoke seat for the GOP.

Finally, my wild card pair: Either Jeff Evans (facing Roscoe Reynolds) or Chris Yakabouski (facing Edd Houck) score an upset win.

Oh, and Stuart beats Pollard.

The net result: Republicans gain one Senate seat, to 24.

House of Delegates:
I confess to knowing far less about the HoD races, but if the GOP will pick up a Senate seat, I expect a Republican gain of 2 House seats. Locally, Mark Cole wins re-election by eight points.

I'm guessing I have the most Republican-friendly prediction out there, but I'm still pretty sure I'm right - this time.

Pakistan in a nutshell

2007-11-05T22:35:00.000-05:00

David Frum and I support different candidates (he, Giuliani; I, Hunter), but I have found him to be remarkable insightful. As Pakistan slips once again toward chaos, Frum hits the nail on the head once more:

What is happening in Pakistan underscores the dangerously symbiotic relationship between authoritarianism and extremism in the Islamic world. Musharraf needs extremists to justify his authoritarianism - and the extremists in turn need him to crowd out more rational alternatives. It's a relationship visible in Egypt and the Gulf as well. Which is why - out of fashion though it may be, neglected even by the president who articulated it - the Bush doctrine will be back. In the long run, free institutions are the only antidote to ideological and religious fanaticism.

Indeed, the relationship between Musharraf and the terrorists in Pakistan has been more than "symbiotic;" he has a history of making deals with terrorist sympathizers in order to isolate Pakistan's democratic parties. In fact, as Musharraf was arresting every opponent to his rule that he could see in Islamabad, he was releasing terrorists as part of a deal with Taliban supporters (Worldwide Standard).

We are told ad infinitum that the only alternative to Musharraf in Pakistan is the terrorists. It isn't true, and Musharraf himself has proven that with his combination of fearlessness in the face of nonviolent democrats and fecklessness in the face of pro-Taliban terrorists.

James Atticus Bowden for Congress

2007-11-02T04:02:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been just over a week since I explained my criteria for endorsing a candidate to replace Jo Ann Davis. We've been blessed with several good candidates in the 1st District, but one has placed himself above all others as the best choice: James Atticus Bowden.

I did not expect the choice to be as easy as it was. It helped that only a few candidates even bothered to provide a detailed response to my inquiry. Most either didn't respond at all or referred me to their press releases and/or websites, none of which mentioned my primary focus: Communist China. As such, the first cut wiped out all but two candidates.

As it happened, both candidates who were left expressed good views on Communist China, the Wahhabist-Ba'athist-Khomeinist War, taxes, and life issues. However, only one candidate volunteered this:

If the PRC attacks Taiwan- then our defense agreement should be honored. The defense of Taiwan from armed attack is worth a war with China.

That statement is as bold as it is necessary. Taiwan has been the red-headed stepchild of international diplomacy for decades. The Communist regime has spent much treasure (and is more than ready to shed blood when the time is right) to swallow up the island democracy and snuff out the light of liberty that Taiwan has become. Yet hardly anyone in American officialdom is willing to come to grips with that fact.

James Atticus Bowden is, and that is why he has earned my support.

I should mention, of course, that he was one of the leaders against the Hampton Roads sales tax referendum in 2002, and was one of the very few who called out the transportation tax hike of 2007 for what it really was.

All of the Republican candidates are head and shoulders above the would-be Democrat nominees, but when it comes to the best person for the job, the choice is clear.

I support James Atticus Bowden, and come next Saturday - barring an unforeseen event that prevents my appearance - I will work and vote for him at the 1st District Convention (at Caroline County High School).

Chris (and others), allow me to explain our problem with Jim Gilmore

2007-10-29T20:57:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since I directly responded to another blogger. Such things tend to be a waste of time and bandwith, even among fellow right-wingers (remember the Virgil Goode flap?). However, this time I need to speak up, because I'm afraid a lot of people in Virginia's rightosphere simply don't understand what so many of us have against Jim Gilmore.

I detailed my views in this link, but I feel the need to repeat it: James Gilmore - in an op-ed in the Washington Post while he was running for President, no less - turned on President Bush and the liberation of Iraq. At the time when the President, the nation, and our troops needed us (pundits, bloggers, and candidates) most, Jim Gilmore ran up the white flag.

Once again, here are his words from the July 18, 2007 op-ed (here's the link again, emphasis added):

It has been my position that this troop increase should be given an opportunity to work. Increasingly, however, reports show that attacks on our troops, Iraqi police and civilians are not abating. It is clear from the statements previously made by your administration that there was never any intention to become embroiled in a guerrilla war, urban or otherwise. American power is not advantaged in such a situation. Trying to fight a guerrilla war in the cities and towns of Iraq has opened opportunities for terrorist enemies such as al-Qaeda and fostered an environment for a Shiite-Sunni civil war in which we have no stake.
. . .
I believe the only realistic alternative -- the least bad option, if you will -- is a limited deliberate drawdown of our military men and women and a redeployment of the forces remaining in the region to areas where they can more efficiently and effectively carry out a clearly defined mission . . . maintaining -- either at bases in Iraq at the request of Iraq or in bases in Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- a military force powerful enough to launch special operations missions against al-Qaeda or Sunni insurgents in Iraq; train Iraqi troops to defend their own country; and guarantee the security of the Iraqi government, if so desired by Iraq.
. . .
American interests come down to protection of our national security, protection of Israel's right to exist, and averting, if possible, a general war in the Middle East, nuclear or otherwise. Our present conduct in Iraq distracts from or is detrimental to those goals.

Simply put, these are not the words of someone I want in the Senate; they are not the words of someone any of you should want in the Senate either. These are not the words of a knowledgeable person on national security; these are not the words of a person determined to win the Wahhabist-Ba'athist-Khomeinist War. Finally, Chris, these are not the words of "a conservative who . . . will actually work at building the party."

Jim Webb Gilmore will tear the Republican Party of Virginia apart; his words will provide endless campaign ads for Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama, or John Edwards, etc.); his nomination will send a signal to the nation (to say nothing of the rest of the world) that the Republican Party's resolve on the WBK War is fading.

We . . . cannot . . . allow . . . this . . . to . . . happen.

This is why the folks at National Review are looking so hard, far, and wide for alternatives, and it is why I am, too.

If this were 2009, and Gilmore was running for Governor, I wouldn't be posting this, but it's a U.S. Senate race. The WBK War will be issue number one, and Jim Gilmore is weak.

He cannot be the nominee.

1st District endorsement announcement coming on November 1

2007-10-28T20:45:00.000-05:00

In case anyone is interested, that's my deadline for campaigns to respond to this post. It may be short notice, but with the convention on the 10th, we're all on a tight schedule.

Iraqis raise money for San Diego fire victims

2007-10-28T20:37:00.000-05:00

This one is for all the "realists," "true conservatives," Ron Paul fans, and other assorted folks who base their opposition to the liberation of Iraq in part on the notion that the Iraqis are a worthless people who should not have been liberated (you know who you are):

Via Rich Lowry, on OP-FOR:

Iraqi Army at Besmaya Installation Support San Diego Fire Victims
by U.S. Army Sgt 1st Class Charlene Sipperly
Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq Public Affairs
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Members of the Iraqi Army in Besmaya collected a donation for the San Diego, Calif., fire victims Thursday night at the Besmaya Range Complex in a moving ceremony to support Besmaya's San Diego residents.
Iraqi Army Col. Abbass, the commander of the complex, presented a gift of $1,000 to U.S. Army Col. Darel Maxfield, Besmaya Range Complex officer in charge, Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, to send to the fire victims in California.
The money was collected from Iraqi officers and enlisted soldiers in Besmaya. In a speech given during the presentation, Col. Abbass stated that he and the Iraqi soldiers were connected with the American people in many ways, and they will not forget the help that the American government has given the Iraqi people. Abbass was honored to participate by sending a simple
fund of $1,000 to the American people in San Diego, to lower the suffering felt by the tragedy.

Need I say more?

Why this Yankee fan is rooting for the Red Sox in this series

2007-10-27T00:02:00.001-05:00

As nearly every baseball fan knows, Boston has only won two World Series titles since America entered World War I; and devout Yankee fan that I am, I'm still hoping the Chowderheads take their third title in nine decades this year.

Here's why:
September 1918: Red Sox win the World Series, defeating the Chicago Cubs in six games.
November 1918: Voters give Republicans control of Congress, stunning and embarrassing the Woodrow Wilson Administration; the GOP would keep control of Congress for a dozen years.

October 2004: Red Sox win the World Series, defeating the St. Louis Cardinals in a four game sweep.
November 2004: President George W. Bush wins re-election, in the process getting more votes than any other candidate for President in American history. Voters also keep the GOP in control of Congress.

October 2007: Red Sox lead the World Series two games to zero over the Colorado Rockies . . .

Now this is the Washington Post I remember

2007-10-25T22:44:00.000-05:00

Roughly ten years ago, the editors of the Washington Post threw nearly everyone in Northern Virginia a curve and endorsed Mark Earley for Attorney General. It was the start of a long series of hiccups to the right for the Post editorial page, culminating in the paper's dramatic (for us media-watchers) decision to endorse the liberation of Iraq in 2002.

Almost immediately, the Washington Post was displaced as America's pre-eminent left-wing newspaper by the previously staid New York Times. As the Times became the paper of record for anti-Bush, Democratic leftism, the Washington Post remained the center-left paper it always was, but to this day it has refused to withdraw its support for Iraq's liberation (at least as far as I know). It even got to the point where National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz called for the Post to go national as an alternative to the Times. You think I'm kidding? Take a look for yourself.

Here's the thing, though. The Post has always been a paper of the center-left, and on occasion, they let it show - witness the paper's de facto campaign against George Allen last year. Still, in a sign of the times, the Post no longer revelled in its full-throated leftism; as they were ripping Allen all over the A Section, they offered a jaw-dropping endorsement to Maryland's then-Republican Governor Bob Erhlich. This was how Ehrlich recounted the strange journey the editors took (Jay Nordinger, National Review Online):

The Washington Post was no friend of Ehrlich either, although it did endorse him for reelection. That was a stunning development. Ehrlich went in for a meeting with the editors, thinking he had “zero chance” of an endorsement. “I let loose, though respectfully,” criticizing their coverage, reading objectionable articles back to them. As if in atonement, or with a newfound appreciation, the Post said, “Reelect Ehrlich” — causing some conservatives to joke that they would reconsider their support.

My point is, the Post has traveled quite a bit away from its old days. So it was refreshing, in an odd way, to see it revert to old form when it looked at the Virginia House of Delegate races (here and here). Not only were the overwhelming majority of endorsements for the Democrats, they laid it exceedingly thick on Republicans who opposed the transportation tax hike of 2007. They were "noisy hard-liners," or "the free-lunch club." Jeff Frederick was tagged as a "glib extremist." It's been a long time since the Post ripped Republicans that hard.

Even so, nothing was as vicious as their treatment of one of our favorites - Delegate Bob Marshall (emphasis added):

The mention of Del. Robert G. Marshall's name is enough to inspire eye-rolling at his legislative antics, even from fellow Republicans. Few lawmakers offer so much off-the-wall legislation on divisive social issues; fortunately, little of it is enacted. When it comes to bread-and-butter issues such as increasing transportation funding for his district, Mr. Marshall was one of the few delegates to vote against a compromise forged by moderates in his party. In Richmond, he is seen mainly as a provocateur. Little wonder that, in a break with tradition, he was denied the chairmanship of a state commission on immigration established by his own legislation. His opponent, Democrat Bruce E. Roemmelt, a former firefighter now in private business, would represent an enormous improvement if he did nothing but sit mute in the House of Delegates; in fact, he offers constructive ideas on education funding and energy conservation.

You know the editors really enjoyed themselves with that one. They also had fun ripping a friend closer to home - Mark Cole:

among the die-hards who opposed the $400 million annually in new transportation funding. Another member of the free-lunch club, he supposes that hundreds of millions of dollars can be siphoned off to pay for roads without harming state funding for education, public safety and health care -- snake oil masquerading as policy.

Of course, the Post forgets to mention that of all the new dollars generated by the tax hike Cole opposed, not one cent was slated for his Fredericksburg area district. So while Cole's vote was a brave act, it didn't really affect his constituents, except for his effort to keep the state in which they live from losing economic competitiveness due to higher taxes.

Here's the thing, though; the editors of the Post are smart people. They know they probably did Cole and Marshall an immense favor by ripping them so bad. They know that Cole and Marshall's supporters will be far more energized now that their guys have been ripped by what is still the local archetype of the liberal elite MSM.

One thing to watch in the Post's editorial page: the editors have been silent on Loudoun's local races. Maybe they're just biding their time, or maybe they know that the one person they desperately want to lose - Sterling Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio - would like nothing better than to get a Cole- and Marshall-like put down. Will they be able to hold their tongues?

We're competitive in Ohio - no, really

2007-10-25T08:20:00.000-05:00

On the list of Bush-carried states where one would think the Republican brand name would tar the presidential candidates so badly they could never recover, Ohio would be first, second, and third. The damage the national party has suffered is compounded by the local party's self-inflicted wounds. The combination led to a near-Democratic sweep in 2006 (the Republican candidate for State Auditor was the lone GOP winner statewide, and he took less than 51% of the vote).

So it's easy to see why I'm delighted, and stunned, to read this (NRO Campaign Spot, emphasis added):

Rasmussen's latest numbers in Ohio have some bright spots for Thompson, and generally a better outlook for the GOP than one might expect:
Forty-eight percent (48%) of Ohio voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton while 50% have a negative view. On the Republican side, McCain is viewed favorably by 54%. Favorables for both Giuliani and Thompson total 53% while Romney earns positive reviews from 43%. Just 38% have an unfavorable view of Thompson while negative ratings for the other GOP candidates are in the low-to-mid forties . . . Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both “lead” Clinton in Ohio by a statistically insignificant two percentage point margin. Fred Thompson is tied with the Democratic frontrunner while Clinton leads Mitt Romney by eight points.

If the Republicans have managed to keep Ohio as competitive today as it was in 2004 (when Bush won by just over 2%), the party is in much better shape than anyone - even the most wild-eyed optimists - have imagined.

Another sign of Democratic comeuppance

2007-10-23T14:43:00.000-05:00

Amidst the whirl and rush of the Democrats' high hopes (and fat campaign checks), I tacked against the wind and presented the case that the Republicans might actually have a decent election in Virginia this year (and here's why what's good election for the Republicans is good for all Virginians).

It turns out I'm not the only one. Check out Jim Geraghty over at the Campaign Spot (National Review Online):

So a little while back, I reported that internal polls for Republican candidates in Virginia's state legislative elections were looking better - that the number of men who self-identified as Republicans jumped - from the low 30s to the high 30s.
Today I report that the news in those internal polls continues to be good. Surprisingly good. They're showing a markedly better environment for Republican candidates, and campaign pollsters aren't quite sure why.
One strategist familiar with the results speculated, "It may just be that there are Republicans out there talking about their issues. The campaigns in aggregate are spending a bucket load. And they have good stuff to say. It may just be that there are folks going, 'Right. I remember that I agree with those guys, regardless of the fact that I'm angry at the President over Iraq,' or whatever other issues."

I'll offer two theories. First, I wonder if the Virginia Democratic party, which had been represented by a particularly conservative, or at least not-liberal crop of candidates in recent years (Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Jim Webb) is now suffering from having Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi dominating the headlines.

Secondly, there's been a lot of talk about illegal immigration in the local news lately.

FWIW, I do think the illegal immigration issue has stopped the NoVa blue drift dead in its tracks, and possible even reversed it. However, I think the party has actually been helped most by the S-CHIP fight. Newspaper polls captured by out-of-staters aside, the political battle has shown economic conservatives that they still have a place in the Republican Party, a message that was lost int he 2004 tax hike debacle and the transportation tax hike fiasco.

So look out folks, we may have a few surprises in store for us next month; and the Democrats are likely in for a rude shock.

My criteria for endorsement in the First District race (and lest anyone forget, I am a constituent)

2007-10-22T19:51:00.000-05:00

From what I can tell, I may be just about the only blogger who lives in Virginia's 1st Congressional District and is neither running for the district seat myself nor backing (yet) any of the rapidly growing list of candidates (Daily Press and On the Spot).

I remain neutral at the present time mainly because I am still waiting to see who's in and who's out. Once the field is settled, I can begin the process of getting in touch with each of them, and determining who will take their place in the hallowed right-hand column with the other endorsees.

However, I can present the criteria I will use to determine whom I will endorse. The paramount issues that will guide my decision are, in descending order of importance (most to least) . . .

Anti-Communism: As I have mentioned earlier, while nearly everyone in the 1st is praising the late Jo Ann Davis, her greatest legacy is also the one discussed the least - her steadfast support for any blow to be struck against the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Chinese regime (and for those who repeatedly ask me, I label it as such to differentiate it from the long-suffering Chinese people) has deliberately been arming and aiding every major enemy we face in the Wahabbist-Ba'athist-Khomeinist War: Iran, Syria, the Taliban, and al Qaeda. In these times, we desperately need a Congressman ready and willing to pick up the anti-Communist torch Jo Ann Davis carried for so long. That means support for the repeal of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with Communist China (something Davis supported throughout her career) and steadfast support for the island democracy of Taiwan. Recognition of the Communists' aid to the WBK terrorists, and thus the WBK War's place as part of Cold War II, would also be a huge plus. This is the issue I will consider first and foremost; a candidate can get this right and win my endorsement if while getting everything else wrong.

That said, in case there are more than one candidate who are acceptable, the other issues are . . .

The WBK War: No, they don't have to borrow my name for the war, but they do have to support prosecuting it to the fullest, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also need to support the liberation of Iran (either through military force or supporting dissidents a la Solidarity in 1980s Poland), and recognize the importance of the fragile yet vital anti-WBK democracy in Lebanon.

Taxes: As I have also written earlier, the 2001 tax cut was a dramatic boost to the American economy at a time when it was badly needed. The candidate who wins my support should support making it permanent, and thus sparing Americans from a crippling tax increase. I will also look at the prior records of candidates on taxes where applicable, so anyone who supported the transportation tax hike of 2007 (or even worse, the tax hikes of 2004) will have to play catch up.

School choice: Most of the public school monopoly system's shortcomings are now impossible to ignore, while other - such as the monopsony power the system has used to hold down teacher salaries - are more subtle and require thought. Either way, it should be obvious that competition is desperately needed. It appears there will be more than a few candidates who agree with me on this one.

Pre-born life and "stem cell research": There will also be quite a few pro-life candidates (otherwise I'd be rating this one higher out of concern), but I'm less certain about candidates agreeing with my position on embryonic stem cell research (IMHO, ESCR should be banned). Just for the record (because I know it will come up), I have no issue with adult SCR.

So, for those of you running or work with those who are, now you know what it will take to win my support. Strangely enough, I'm hearing my endorsement may actually mean something, but I guess we'll figure that out during the campaign.

The biggest issue no one is mentioning: the Bush tax cut

2007-10-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

These are the days when I fear for my country most: the biggest domestic issue of the campaign has received almost no coverage - the fate of the 2001 "Bush tax cut." Tonight's Republican debate had the usual amount of discussion on the issue, namely, zero (New York Times, feel free to look at all eighteen links that comprise the debate transcript; you will not find a word on the subject).

This is shocking, The 2001 tax reduction was the most salient economic event of the 21st century. It turned a multi-year, September 11th-impacted depression into an eight-month recession. It has pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average well over 13,000 - and for a time, past 14,000. It spawned the fifth longest period of economic growth in American history.

Yet, it is not permanent. The 2001 tax cut "sunsets" in 2011 - meaning the American people will suddenly have to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in higher taxes four years from now. It is - forgive the hyperbole - America's financial September 11th, except that it's completely predictable and avoidable.

Now, each of the four leading GOP candidates (or perhaps I should say, each of the five leaders minus Mike Huckabee) supports extending the tax cuts - at least if the AP and CNN are to be believed - but none of them have, as far as I can tell, made it a centerpiece of their campaign. This mistake must be fixed. This is the one issue - taxes - where Republicans can regain the trust of voters (for all his faults, no one has accused President Bush of being a tax-hiker). If the American people understand that a vote for a Democratic presidential or Congressional candidate is a vote for a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-tax-increase, they will reject the Democrats en masse.

I know from where I speak: I watched desperate Republicans use the tax issue to stave off Democratic realignment in New Jersey (where I grew up) for ten years, while in Virginia (where I live know), Republicans have blown several winnable races due to their chaotic response to the tax issue.

The Republican Party needs the economic conservative message in order to win. Without it, we lose. It's that simple. Meanwhile, a tax increase as heavy as the 2001 tax ct "sunset" will deal the economy a horrific blow. We cannot allow that to happen, and as Republicans - the party who actually knows something about the economy - we have a duty as Americans to stop it. I just hope our presidential candidates understand the urgency.

Once again, Mark Levin says what I was thinking

2007-10-21T23:16:00.000-05:00

The radio host makes the perfect point about Ron Paul here in the Corner (NRO):

As for Ron Paul, his understanding of the founding is simplistic and inaccurate. Yes, the Founders believed in individual liberty. But they believed in a whole lot more.

Indeed they did.

John Derbyshire singes the Communist Chinese Olympics

2007-10-17T08:47:00.000-05:00

The in-house curmudgeon for National Review Online has a list of "demonstration sports" that the Chinese Communist Party has ready to go for next year's Beijing Olympiad.

I have made several attempts to describe or summarize it, but words fail me: read the whole thing.

Cross-posted to the China e-Lobby and the Shotgun

2007: 1995 all over again?

2007-10-16T16:25:00.000-05:00

I was amused to see Ben Tribbett (a.k.a. Not Larry Sabato) predict the Democrats would win the Senate and carve a huge chunk into the Republican majority in the House of Delegates. After looking at his site just now, I think I understand why: money.

Most of the Democrats in the competitive races have a cash advantage on their GOP rivals, and as Tribbett breathlessly notes: "Governor Tim Kaine has already given away more than one million dollars, and has another million in the bank to help candidates in the last three weeks."

Democrats always tend to overvalue money's role in the campaign - largely because they tend to lose on the issues, and can't understand why. Republicans, by contrast, tend to overvalue various issues, and undervalue others, but that's a story for another post.

Anyhow, I have found that what tends to matter far more than in an election is momentum: who has it, and who doesn't. As for the momentum in Virginia, that's a much more difficult call.

Statewide, one would give the Democrats the momentum: their riding a weakened but hardly negated national wave; their voters are motivated (that's one thing money can usually show, unless one politician - in this case, Governor Kaine - decides to flood the races with enough money to drown out the dollar-voices of ordinary contributors); and their doesn't seem to be any statewide Republican response. Thus, in races with "conventional" Republicans (Stuart vs. Pollard, Rerras vs. Northam, Devolites-Davis vs. Chapman, and O'Brien vs. Barker for example) one would expect a Democratic edge.

There are problems with that analysis, however. Each of the aforementioned races has dynamics that run afoul of the momentum theory. For example, Stuart - a resident of Westmoreland County - cuts heavily in Albert Pollard's political base on the Northern Neck, while Pollard has made little, if any, headway in the predominantly Republican areas of the district (Stafford and Fauquier). Northam appears to run into trouble with the Daily Press about some of his anti-Rerras flyers (Bearing Drift); as a Democrat, getting called out by MSM is a serious handicap. Devolites-Davis has the advantage of her husband, and has a pro-life history that will motivate voters no matter what is happening statewide. Finally, O'Brien, whose district includes a large chunk of western Prince William County, will likely benefit from the illegal immigration brouhaha and the kick-start that has meant to the local Republican vote. In fact, that issue could even take down Democratic incumbent Charles Colgan.

Meanwhile, the Democrats (and Ben) are also counting on wins from places where Republicans unhorsed "conventional" incumbents with conservatives. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were they. The fact that these nominees (Smith in Roanoke, Stall on the Peninsula, etc.) are on the ballot all but ensures that they have the local momentum, and the motivated voters.

In fact, when I look at the 2007 races, I can't help but remember 1995. For those who don't remember, we had a badly weakened President whose party was desperately trying to hold on to the Virginia legislature, while the other party seemingly had unstoppable momentum coming from the seizure of Congress the year before and a Governor whose popularity was as irrefutable as it was maddening to his opponents.

Sound familiar?

George Allen tried to frame the debate, too. He (and his supporters., myself included) were all but certain that Virginians would extend the "Spirit of '94" and unhorse the Democrats. Moreover, the Republican Congress in 1995 was, while hardly loved, far more popular than the current Democratic version, and Allen himself was more popular than Kaine is today.

The results? The Democrats lost all of one House seat and two Senate seats. The Senate was forced into a power-sharing arrangement, while the House Democrats maintained control. It took another two-and-a-half years for the Republicans to inch into the majority in the Senate (via a special election), and four years to finally win the House. It was arguably the biggest Virginia election surprise in ten years.

Now, maybe I'm engaging in wishful thinking here (wouldn't be the first time), but I can't help but see a repeat roaring down the track. I guess we'll know for sure on the morning of November 7.

The Washington Post throws a few curves

2007-10-16T08:15:00.000-05:00

It's endorsement time over at the Washington Post, which is actually far more entertaining than is normally perceived. The Post has had a long history of tilting left, but not necessarily "falling over" (my term). I still remember the complete shock of reading the November 2, 1997 edition and finding - right after the words "For Attorney General:" - the name "Mark Earley."

Then of course, there is the still side-splitting move the editors pulled last year when, desperate for a fig-leaf behind which to hide its campaign to dump George Allen, they endorsed Bob Ehrlich's re-election.

Today (the Virginia Senate endorsements) brings a few more curve balls marbled in the traditional list of Democrats warmly endorsed by the Post. Among them:

The 34th District: I found amusing the paper's initial description of Senator Jeannemarie Devolites-Davis, "first elected to the legislature as a conservative Republican." That comes as news to those of us who used to live up there, and remember how she was first outflanked on the right by Mike Polychrones in a now long-forgotten 1996 special election primary for the House of Delegates (in fact, I'm fairly certain I got the nominee's name wrong). Still, she's a Republican - and not quite as wishy-washy as she appears south of the Occoquan - in what the Post admits is "the year's most closely watched and expensive Senate contest." For the editors to drop Chap Peterson - "whom we've backed in past races for other offices" - and endorse her is huge blow.

The 37th District: I don't agree with Riley (Virginia Virtucon), who insists that "no endorsement is essentially an endorsement for Cooch." After all, the editors did steer clear of subtle messages and endorse Early outright ten years ago. Still, the editors did plenty of damage to Ken Cuccinelli's Democratic opponent - not just by refusing to back her, but calling her "embarrassingly short on substance." Ouch.

As an aside, for the editors to call Cuccinelli "doctrinaire" after he caved and voted for the transportation tax hike of 2007 is ridiculous; then again, I am still the only person I know who calls Cooch a squish for that vote.

The 27th District: After all the hoopla over the Tate issue, VCAP, Shaun Kenney, and NLS, the Post effectively puts the spike in any effort to knock of Jill Holtzman Vogel. In the 27th (I've lived there, too), you need a lot of things as a Democrat in order to win. One essential is the Post signaling the newcomers from Fairfax, Loudoun, and other points eastward. Without it, you're toast.

The rest were, as one would expect, Democrats, but I do have to take issue with one comment the editors made . . .

The 28th District: Albert Pollard was "a thoughtful and independent-minded lawmaker"? Pshaw! The man voted to raise our taxes, and then retired before facing the voters. All I can say is that Pollard is lucky his district ends at the Rappahannock River; if I lived in the 28th, I'd be carrying a figurative torch for him all October long.

What was Stanley Kurtz thinking?

2007-10-16T06:42:00.000-05:00

Stanley Kurtz's latest column on Stalinist North Korea (National Review Online) is quite unique; in the column, he managed to be dazzlingly brilliant and shockingly ignorant at the same time and with the same words. That's hard to do.

First, I'll dispatch with the brilliant part: Kurtz is one of the very few pundits who has never really signed on to the six-party nuclear talks, and now that Stalinist North Korea's nuclear dalliance with Syria is an open secret, he aims squarely - and correctly - at the Bush Administration for its weakness:

President Bush did in fact adopt the Democrats’ North Korea policy. And now, within a year, that Democratic policy has failed. Almost immediately after North Korea’s nuclear test on October 9, 2006, President Bush warned that “the transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and we would hold North Korea fully accountable.” Having deployed the stick, at the behest of conservative hawks, the president then offered the carrot of economic aid and promises of security in return for disarmament . . . The problem is that a combination of carrots and sticks has not stopped Kim Jong Il from handing Syria extensive nuclear technology, and perhaps even fissile material.

Indeed, it hasn't, just like many of us said it wouldn't.

Kurtz then goes on to detail just how damaging to American deterrence this is, how both the Administration and its critics are trying to downplay the SNK-Syria connection in the hope it goes away, and then ends with an ominous (but not necessarily inaccurate) prediction: "Based on current trends, in the decade ahead, a nuclear attack on the United States seems at least as likely as not." The piece is brilliantly and cogently written for its limited scope. However, it is exactly the limitation in scope that also makes the piece completely useless.

Why do I say that? Simple, in all of Kurtz's 2,200+ words on Stalinist North Korea, the number of times he mentioned Communist China was - exactly - zero. Not one reference to the regime that has propped up North Korea for almost sixty years; no mention of the Communist-run Bank of China's possible role in helping the Stalinists launder money for its nuclear program or Communist regime's sale of plutonium making, uranium enriching tributyl phosphate; and no discussion of Communist China's history of running interference for its Stalinist ally during the six-party talks.

Kurtz's glaring omission become all the more shocking when one finds his comments about the similarities between SNK today and Cuba of 1962:

The answer, says Allison, is a direct and unambiguous warning to Kim Jong Il modeled on President Kennedy’s statements during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Kennedy warned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union, President Bush needs to unambiguously promise retaliation for any nuclear explosion of North Korean origin on American soil. According to Allison, America will only be safe if Kim feels “in his gut” that North Korea will be held directly responsible for nuclear terror — even if the blast results from material passed through a chain of rogue states and only eventually into terrorist hands. On the other hand, if Kim feels as though he can escape detection as the ultimate source of a terrorist nuclear weapon, or if Kim believes that he will not be held directly responsible for his place in a long and complex chain of nuclear proliferation, the path is open to likely nuclear terror on American soil within the next decade.

The ignorance is jaw-dropping.

Contrary to Kurtz's assertion (I know he quotes Harvard professor Graham Allison here, but it's pretty clear he agrees with him), Kim Jong-il has never been in the Krushchev role during this crisis; he's in the Castro role. Kim is not acting on his own, he is acting in concert with his de facto colonial masters. Any threat against him is utterly useless for this reason.

It is not Kim Jong-il who must face the threat of annihilation by counter-strike, it's the Communist Chinese regime that props him up. They are in the Krushchev role, not Kim; they are the source of America's proliferation worries. In fact, it is Communist China, not its Stalinist puppet, that killed off non-proliferation. So long as learned men like Stanley Kurtz continue to ignore this fundamental fact, they will miss the forest for the trees, and not only will nuclear proliferation not be stopped, it will likely be accelerated, due to the simple fact that the true culprit continues to act unnoticed, let alone unchecked.

Stanley Kurtz is a brilliant writer and thinker, one of the very few outside of the anti-Communist community that I respect. Therefore, I can only ask (in the hope he responds): what was he thinking?

Cross-posted to China e-Lobby

Meanwhile, down in Richmond . . .

2007-10-10T07:45:00.001-05:00

The Republicans are finally showing why keeping them in control of the legislature is infinitely preferable to handing the keys to the Democrats: Speaker Howell and crew found enough unspent money ($170 million) to cut the state's potential budget shortfall in half.

The current shortfall ($171 million) is now less than one-quarter of one percent of the state budget. Try to keep that in mind when (or, should the Republicans hang on to their legislative majorities, if) Governor Kaine asks for a tax hike next year.

The Ward View has all the details in this must-read post.

Communist China and the GOP Presidential debate

2007-10-10T07:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's Republican presidential debate covered a lot of topics, including Communist China (transcript via Detroit Free-Press).

As usual, Duncan Hunter was terrific on the damage Communist China is doing to the American economy:

. . . let me tell you, Chris, what is missing from this economy: 1.8 million jobs that have moved to communist China from the United States . . . what I would do is pass the Hunter-Ryan bill which would put countervailing duties on the Chinese when they cheat. They are cheating on trade right now . . . when Communist China devalues their currency by 40 percent, they undercut American products around the world . . .

That said - and remember, I say this as a Hunter guy - I would have preferred he focus a little more on the national security threat of the Communist regime. As it was, that issue was taken up by two other candidates, Tom Tancredo . . .

But if they wanted to buy something else that would have, in this case, certainly, more of an impact on our national security interests, I'd say, no, we'd have to think about that in a totally different way. It is exactly the same with regard to China. There are things that we should have thought of in the first place, when we passed the PNTR, which I voted against, along with Duncan Hunter. And I absolutely agree that trade is a great idea in many respects. But when you trade with people who are your potential enemy, and they have shown a willingness to use that economic opportunity to actually increase their threats to the United States, I'm not for trading with them at all.

. . . and Fred Thompson:

I was one of the strictest advocates of imposing restrictions on the Chinese for their behavior in terms of exporting dangerous materials to other countries and tying some of trade policies to what they did in that regard. They have still not done enough. They have devalued their currency which puts them in a favored position as far as our manufacturers are concerned.

FYI and for the record, Fred Thompson did indeed push hard for those curbs, but he still voted for PNTR with Communist China after the curbs were voted down. As for Tancredo, again, but for the presence of Hunter in the race, he'd be my favorite.

However, the last candidate who had previously won my conditional approval, Rudy Giuliani, lost it with a slew of terrible answers:

We're a country that should think about all these people that are coming out of poverty in China and India and elsewhere -- we should think of them as new customers . . . What are China and India trying to do? China and India are trying to develop themselves to be like us, which is why we got a heck of a lot we can sell to them . . .

This is utterly wrong on so many levels that I can't get into all of them, but I can remind everyone that "China and India" is just about the most ignorant geopolitical pairing imaginable. No one who falls into that trap can be expected to steer the ship of state thoughtfully enough, in my humble opinion.

As for the rest, John McCain was terrible ("It sounds like a lot of fun to bash Chinese and others, but . . .) - trust me, Senator, if it were that much fun, we would have a lot more company over here - while Messrs. Romney and Brownback made some minor comments.

The main thing, however, is this: Giuliani is off the "list," while Thompson stays on. As the year comes to a close, those of us in the anti-Communist community (at least those of us who are Republicans) need to remember the need to prevent the anti-Communist vote from splitting, and ask ourselves if a Thompson in the hand is worth Tancredo and Hunter in the bush.

For now, though, I'm still holding out hope for Hunter.

Cross-posted to the China e-Lobby

A great one is lost

2007-10-08T20:13:00.000-05:00

Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis passed away over the weekend. Although she had been battling breast cancer for a few years, she took a sudden turn for the worse last week.

Jo Ann Davis was one of the best anti-Communists in Congress; I was honored to call her my member of Congress. This is a painful blow.

We will all miss her.

Cross-posted to the China e-Lobby and On the Spot

Christy Jett: the choice for Circuit Court Clerk

2007-10-07T19:51:00.000-05:00

When you look at an office like Circuit Court Clerk, you look for three things: experience, performance, and accessibility. In Spotsylvania County, the best candidate on these respective issues are Christy Jett, Christy Jett, and Christy Jett.

On the first issue (experience), one would normally look to the incumbent, but in this case, Paul Metzger is not the candidate with the most experience running a court system. In fact, Jett has been Clerk of the Spotsy Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court since before Metzger was first elected, while neither Cary Crismond nor Greg Carter have ever run a court clerk's office.

As for performance, Jett comes out first again. A look at the record shows Jett's audits had fewer issues pop up than Metzger's (even though Metzger had one fewer audit).

Finally, on accessibility, only one candidate has promised to extend the clerk's office hours to make it easier for Spotsylvanians. Jett, if elected, will keep the office open one day a week from 6AM to 6PM. Those of us who have to commute way north to get to work are especially appreciative of that.

I can understand how in races like this, even Republican voters would more reasons to vote for a candidate besides the party label. In the race for Circuit Court Clerk, there is no need for concern: Republican Christy Jett is easily the best choice.

Cross-posted to On the Spot

Would a third-party candidate really hurt Giuliani?

2007-10-05T20:12:00.000-05:00

I'm somewhat surprised it has taken this long for someone to notice Rudy Giuliani could bleed right-wing voters to a third party (Below the Beltway). For starters, it hits Giuliani on one of his strongest points - electability; it also reminds nearly everyone in the Republican Party the risks of nominating him, something that would naturally be helpful to his opponents. The trouble is, I'm not sure the assumption is correct.

I know voters will have an alternative to Giuliani from the right; it's called the Constitution Party, and it is virulently opposed to the liberation of Iraq. Ron Paul, should he choose to bolt, would have a decent chance of getting the CP nod.

I'm just not sure it hurts Giuliani.

Third parties have a history of wrecking political campaigns, but changing outcomes is far rarer. Traditionally, third parties begin as a breakaway faction of one of the two main parties, and are expected to do the most damage to the aggrieved major party. However, if the third party manages to catch the Zeitgeist, they end up pulling away voters from both parties. These third parties manage to do far better than even they expect, but as a consequence, the two parties positions end up relatively unchanged.

In 1848, for example, the Free Soil Party was launched by New York Democrats furious at the Polk Administration's pro-slavery policies. The Free Soilers knew full well they would end up handing New York to the Whigs, but they also appealed to so many anti-slavery Whigs in Ohio they ended up handing that state to the Democrats. Thus, each party lost a "base" state, but the electoral votes ended up roughly the same (New York had 9 more votes than Ohio, hardly enough to make a difference).

We could see something similar this year. It is widely assumed that the "paleocon" vote will not come anywhere near Giuliani; thus it's assumed a Ron Paul candidacy (or a similar anti-war third party right-wing candidate) will only hurt Rudy. However, we forget the likely Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton) is not exactly the favorite among the "doves." In fact, her most recent pick for a foreign policy advisor is already catching flak (Talk Left). Should the choice be among Clinton, Giuliani, and Paul, the dovish vote on the left could very well go to Paul. That could wreak havoc on the blue states.

What's that? You can't see lifelong Democrats casting a vote for Ron Paul. Tell it to your great-great-great-great-grandparents, who saw tens of thousands of Whigs vote for Martin Van Buren, whom they had voted against on a national ticket no less than three times in less than ten years.

On General Pace

2007-10-05T09:02:00.000-05:00

With one plea from the editors of National Review, General Peter Pace (retired) suddenly has a boomlet of support for John Warner's Senate seat here in Virginia (Mason Conservative, Cathouse Chat, The Ward View, and Virginia Virtucon).

Now, we still need to know more about the good General's views - a lot more. Still the mere fact that we can have an alternative to Tom Wobbly Davis and Jim Webb Gilmore is promising.

I can go that far.

Ron Paul, supporter of price controls

2007-10-04T11:22:00.000-05:00

Presidential candidate Ron Paul hauled in a nice chunk of change over the last three months (Boston Globe), due in part to his opposition to the liberation of Iraq and in part due to his loud fealty to the Constitution - and his supposed refusal to support any government spending or regulation that goes beyond its enumerated powers.

His supporters might be shocked to know that, in Paul's mind, "constitutional government" includes de facto price controls on prescription drugs. Three links from National Review Online provide the details on the House Democratic plan. and here, in Roll Call 23, is Ron Paul's "Yes" vote.

So, in Ron Paul's' mind, Saddam Hussein isn't nearly as dangerous as pharmaceutical companies - and more to the point, neither is intrusive government.

Constitutional government, my foot.

Jim Gilmore was weak on Iraq; I cannot support him for Senator

2007-10-01T20:28:00.000-05:00

I really wanted to support Jim Gilmore for Senate. I'm one of many who believe he has been underestimated as a Governor. I was ready and eager to see him take on Mark Warner, especially since Warner threw Gilmore under the bus on the budget.

I was, but I am no longer. I simply cannot support Gilmore's candidacy, and for one simple reason - Gilmore pulled a John Wobbly Warner on Iraq, and that disqualifies him for the Senate, period.

Surprisingly, the local blogosphere seemed to have missed Gilmore's June 18 wilt in the Washington Post (although I am basing this on a search from three months hence, as this happened just after I went dark). Still it cannot be ignored. Not only does Gilmore publicly express his disapproval of the President's strategy, he hides behind the tried old shibboleths that typify the yellow-streak Republicans.

Gilmore starts sounding silly in the second paragraph of his abysmal piece (emphasis added):

As you know from my public statements, I have supported your increase in troops in Iraq in the belief that a new initiative was necessary to bring the Iraq war to a successful conclusion. It has been my position that this troop increase should be given an opportunity to work. Increasingly, however, reports show that attacks on our troops, Iraqi police and civilians are not abating.
It is clear from the statements previously made by your administration that there was never any intention to become embroiled in a guerrilla war, urban or otherwise. American power is not advantaged in such a situation. Trying to fight a guerrilla war in the cities and towns of Iraq has opened opportunities for terrorist enemies such as al-Qaeda and fostered an environment for a Shiite-Sunni civil war in which we have no stake.

The ignorance in that paragraph is Webb-esque. Iraq has never been in a "Sunni-Shiite civil war," it has been fighting a double-edged Iranian infiltration, in which both al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army have taken part. As for the "guerrilla war," what does Gilmore recommend? Letting al Qaeda win it?

In fact, Gilmore doesn't really answer. Instead, he piously calls for "a third way," which sounds quite a bit like the way of the Democrats:

I believe the only realistic alternative -- the least bad option, if you will -- is a limited deliberate drawdown of our military men and women and a redeployment of the forces remaining in the region to areas where they can more efficiently and effectively carry out a clearly defined mission . . . maintaining -- either at bases in Iraq at the request of Iraq or in bases in Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- a military force powerful enough to launch special operations missions against al-Qaeda or Sunni insurgents in Iraq; train Iraqi troops to defend their own country; and guarantee the security of the Iraqi government, if so desired by Iraq.

In other words, Gilmore wanted our troops to return to the very failed plan that led to the pre-surge problems on the first place. He makes exactly the same mistake the Democrats do.

Gilmore the concludes with a classic Webb-like drive-by smear:

American interests come down to protection of our national security, protection of Israel's right to exist, and averting, if possible, a general war in the Middle East, nuclear or otherwise. Our present conduct in Iraq distracts from or is detrimental to those goals.

Gilmore dropped that political bomb at the very time it became increasingly clear to more and more observers that the American military was taking the fight to the terrorists - an overwhelming majority of whom were and are not Iraqis - and making improvements. Now, Gilmore did not echo Harry "The war is lost" Reid, but he came damn close - far too close for my comfort.

If this were a race for Governor, these issues would take second place to Gilmore's firm rejection of tax increases. However, this is a race for the United States Senate, and as such, national security must come first.

Therefore, I cannot support Jim Gilmore, and since Tom Davis is no better, I have no choice but to sit on the sidelines until a Republican candidate who supports the mission emerges. One Jim Webb in the Senate is bad enough; we don't need two.

Please help stop a Communist Chinese firm from getting a piece of 3Com

2007-09-30T21:12:00.001-05:00

Just below this post is my open letter to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) on Huawei Technologies' attempt to partially buy out 3Com. To say this is a danger is a tremendous understatement. Irwin Stelzer (Weekly Standard) has all the details; for anyone wondering how troubling this is, keep in mind that Stelzer is an economist, and an avid free-trader to boot. Yet not only does he recognie the national security issues, he wisely has it trump everything else:

One can only hope that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson reads up on his Adam Smith, no protectionist he. Smith warned that when national security is at stake, free trade takes a distant second place as a national priority. The great Scot is, as usual, as relevant to our day as he was when he wrote The Wealth of Nations 230 years ago.

Sadly, the great Scot is no longer with us, but we had a similar issue come up in 2003, when Li Ka-shing tried to buy out Global Crossing. We made our voices heard to the CFIUS, and within days, Li backed off. Whether or not the two were related is not known, but I figured it was worth a shot.

So, for those of you who are reading this from America, please join me in letting the CFIUS know how we feel. Feel free to copy the letter I sent, or tweak as you like, and send it to CFIUS Chief of Staff Gay Hartwell Sills. Just remember to be civil (or it won't be read), and stick to the facts, which are harrowing enough.

For those of you reading this from outside the United States, if you could, please ask your government to advise the U.S. against approving this deal. They don't need to make their concerns public (in fact, there's reason to believe tha would be counterproductive), but it is well known that the President listens to world leaders he considers his friends, which for now include, among others, Stephen Harper (Canada), Angela Merkel (Germany), and Nic Sarkozy (France).

To be honest, I didn't really expect to throw myself into an activist move like this, but this is too important for me - for us - to stay on the sidelines. This deal must be stopped.

Cross-posted to the China e-Lobby

Open letter to the CFIUS on Huawei Technologies' attempt to partially buy out 3Com

2007-09-30T20:55:00.000-05:00

I sent the following letter to Ms. Gay Hartwell Sills, Staff Chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, asking the Committee to reject the Huawei Technologies-Bain Capital deal to buy out 3Com. This letter has been cross-posted to the China e-Lobby.

D.J. McGuire
China e-Lobby
china_e_lobby@yahoo.com

Ms. Gay Hartwell Sills
Staff Chair
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States ("CFIUS")
Office of International Investment
Department of Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Room 4201 NY
Washington, DC 20220
gay.sills@do.treas.gov

Dear Ms. Sills,

As I'm sure you are aware, Huawei Technologies has just entered into an agreement with Bain Capital to acquire 3Com, a leading information technology firm that, among other things, helps the Department of Defense ward off cyber-attacks from hostile forces and nations. While Huawei will only acquire a minority stake, to have partial ownership of 3Com by a Communist-controlled corporation is dangerous, and Huawei, in particular, especially dangerous. I humbly ask that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reject any acquisition of 3Com that involves Huawei.

Huawei Technologies is a danger to the United States not only because it is a company from Communist China - and thus under the control of the Party even if its ownership is ostensibly "private" - but also because it has been one of the leading enablers of terrorism on the planet. In 2001, Huawei was exposed as one of the Communist Chinese firms building an Iraqi fiber-optic network that would have enabled Saddam Hussein to integrate his air-defense system. The firm was also involved in building a telephone network for the Taliban in Afghanistan, while the terrorist group was sheltering and aiding Osama bin Laden.

Communist China itself has an ever more detailed history of aiding our enemies in the Global War on Terror - including Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and al Qaeda - so Huawei's recent actions suggest not a deviation from Communist Party policy, but its fulfillment.

I'm sure Huawei will offer to accept constraints on what it can and cannot access from 3Com. However, the Communist regime and its corporations have a history of violating agreements and pledges, so any deal to which Huawei agrees is questionable, at best.

The reality is, Huawei's history disqualifies it from any role with a firm as sensitive as 3Com. For this reason, I do not believe any deal involving Huawei should be approved. Please reject any deal that involves Huawei.
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter.

Yours Truly,

D.J. McGuire
Co-founder and President: China e-Lobby

Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about

2007-09-27T22:00:00.000-05:00

Delmarva Dealings takes Mark Warner to task:

The Dems love to crow that Mark Warner was soooo popular when he left office. Of course I wonder how popular he’ll be when Virginians are reminded of all the taxes they now have to pay thanks to Mark?

Exactly.

Ward, Riley, what the f**k are you doing?

2007-09-26T22:49:00.000-05:00

Well, I've seen the Warner You Tube montage being sent around; Ward links to Riley at Virginia Virtucon, who called it "A hint of what's to come for Mark Warner."

Let me be blunt: if the campaign is headed down that road, then "what's to come for Mark Warner" will include a January 3, 2009 inauguration on Capitol Hill.

Didn't we learn this lesson last year? Didn't we see what happens when we go with questionable innuendo instead of issues? Didn't we all watch the same campaign go down in flames because George Allen thought Jim Webb's comments on women in the military from 1980 were more important than his dangerously bone-headed comments on Syria in the middle of the campaign (see Ignorant Comment of the Day)?

Or, to put it another way, has absolutely everyone in the Virginia rightosphere forgotten Mark Warner's actual, abysmal record?!

If we're supposed to salivate over suspected yet secret scandals, than the answer to the last question is an unequivocal, tragic, and painful, "YES."

So, allow me to remind everyone the real reason we must defeat Mark Warner: his record as Governor.

When Mark Warner began his gubernatorial term in 2002, the biennial budget stood at $47 million. Warner then began a well-publicized parade of "cuts" to the state budget, "cuts" he said were desperately needed to keep the state solvent.

So how much lower was the 2002-2004 budget than its predecessor? Wrong question. In fact, Warner's "painful" budget of "cuts" was $4.5 billion higher than Gilmore's last budget.

During the next budget cycle, Warner was at it again; this time insisting on a $1.4 billion tax increase. He said it was imperative to balance the budget - leaving out the fact that the 2004-06 budget had an increase of nearly $10 billion, or roughly seven times the tax increase he insisted was essential.

By the time the "fiscal conservative" Warner left office in 2006, state spending was nearly 30% higher than it was when he came in. He added $14 billion in new spending without batting an eyelash.

With all of this, we're supposed to ask why Mark Warner didn't run for President?

To borrow a suddenly popular phrase: Give me a f**kin' break!

Forget asking Warner why he didn't run for President. I have a far more important question: Where did the $14 billion go?

Jim Webb's Foot-in-Mouth Disease: Exhibit Sixteen

2007-09-25T16:06:00.000-05:00

I'm back less than a week, and Jim Webb is at it again!

Just this afternoon, Webb took to the Senate floor to castigate the Lieberman-Kyl resolution, which would designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Webb was at least smart enough not to actually claim the IRGC wasn't a terrorist group, but instead he went back into his dark fantasy about a White House plan to invade Iran (via Think Progress):

At worst, (Lieberman-Kyl) could be read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action, without one hearing and without serious debate . . . We are about to vote on something that may fundamentally change the way the United States views the Iranian military.

Webb has been banging on for a while now about a supposed secret White House plan to invade Iran - and I have the same reaction every time - I wish. Sadly, all Webb does is reveal his complete ignorance.

For starters, the notion that Lieberman-Kyl would give the Administration a green light to invade Iran is preposterous. First of all, Lieberman-Kyl is non-binding (Fox News). Secondly, even if the Administration were to follow through and name the IRGC a terrorist group, it would be number forty-three on this State Department list. Are we at war with the other forty-two? Hardly. Moreover, the Iranian regime itself is already listed as a state sponsor of terrorism (State again), along with Cuba, Syria, North Korea, and the Sudan. At present, we aren't at war with any of them. More to the point, to follow Webb's assertion to its logical conclusion, the Administration could use the Iranian regime's place on the state-sponsor list as justification for military action regardless of whether or not the label is placed in the IRGC.

Finally, as I've mentioned before, the Bush Administration doesn't need this - or any other terrorist label on any part of the Iranian mullahcracy - to liberate Iran. That authorization was implicit as part of the post-9/11 authorization passed by Congress, which states:

(T)he President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

By this criteria, and based on the evidence gathered by the 9/11 Commission (see here) Iran certainly "aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." In other words, the President has had the authority to liberate Iran by force for years. The President has chosen not to do so, for whatever reason, and no one in their right mind would assume a non-binding Senate resolution would change this.

No one, that is, except Senator Webb, who seems keen to remind us all just how much of a mistake it was to elect him in the first place.

Hillary Clinton made an open-ended commitment to defeat

2007-09-24T23:20:00.000-05:00

Senator Hillary Clinton was all over the television Sunday morning, trying to minimize her vote to defund the troops after next June. In fact, when asked point-blank whether or not she would have all American troops out of Iraq by 2013 (assuming she is elected next year), she refused to answer (Washington Post via Worldwide Standard, emphasis added):

Asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos whether she would withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq during a first term as president, Clinton (D-N.Y.) gave a simple answer: She did not know.But she used more than 225 words to say so. "You know, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals and make pledges, because I don't know what I'm going to inherit, George. I don't know and neither do any of us know what will be the situation in the region. How much more aggressive will Iran have become?" Clinton said. "What will be happening in the Middle East? How much more of an influence will the chaos in Iraq have in terms of what's going on in the greater region? Will we have pushed al-Qaeda in Iraq out of their strongholds with our new partnership with some of the tribal sheiks or will they have regrouped and retrenched?"
She continued: "I don't know, and I think it's not appropriate to be speculating. I can tell you my general principles and my goal. I want to end the war in Iraq. I want to do so carefully, responsibly, with the withdrawal of our troops, also, with the withdrawal of a lot of our civilian employees, the contractors who are there, and the Iraqis who have sided with us.

Now, the first paragraph is quite reasonable (for a Democrat) and quite close to the President's viewpoint. In fact Brian Faughan - the author of the Worldwide Standard post, even went so far as to ask: "How exactly is this position different from that of President Bush?" At first glance, it doesn't look different at all. In reality, however, Hillary's stance is very different from the President's, and far, far worse.

Yes, Hillary would base her withdrawal decision on the behavior of Iran and al-Qaeda. However, she tips her hand with her list of folks who would be part of the withdrawal (emphasis added): "the withdrawal of our troops, also, with the withdrawal of a lot of our civilian employees, the contractors who are there, and the Iraqis who have sided with us."

The fact is, if Operation Iraqi Freedom succeeds, we won't need to bring our Iraqi friends back with us, we will leave them behind as part of the new, democratic Iraq - in fact, that's the whole point. By including our Iraqi allies in the list of folks pulling out, Senator Clinton is assuming our mission in Iraq will fail, not succeed.

In other words, while the President has made an open-ended commitment to victory in Iraq, Senator Clinton has made an open-ended commitment to an embarrassing and damaging defeat - but one that will take four years and who knows how many American lives in the process.

The message Hillary sent to our men and women in uniform is clouded, but unmistakable. From Day 1 of the Hillary Clinton Administration onward, every single American who dies in Iraq will die in vain. The President has sent no such message; no President should send such a cold and callous message; and no one who would send such a message should ever become President.

Why I gave the Republicans a blanket endorsement

2007-09-23T22:09:00.000-05:00

Before the go-dark date (June 7), I wasn't exactly generous with my endorsements of candidates. It was a very few, excellent anti-tax politicians who won a place in the hallowed right-hand column - and no one else. I can remember particularly well a conversation with a fellow blogger in which I explained that Ken Cuccinelli's vote for the transportation tax hike would make it much harder for him to make my endorsee list.

I even called Cuccinelli a "squish" - and perhaps more surprisingly for some, I hold that view to this day.

Thus, those who remember my prior stinginess with endorsements may be surprised to see me handing it over to every Republican running for office in Virginia. At the very least, that blogger would probably like an explanation. I could go into detail about the nature of primary elections versus general elections, or the nature of party loyalty, or various other things, but for me, as always, it's about trying to ensure as much as possible that taxes are low and government is limited in domestic affairs. That requires as many Virginia Republican victories as possible in 2007.

Given that the Republican leadership in Richmond was the impetus for the tax hike that eventually became law, what I just wrote might sound a little strange (in fact, it is a little strange). However, the reality is, Governor Kaine and his fellow Democrats were looking to raise taxes far higher than the Republican leadership was (mistakenly) willing to go. In fact, had the Democratic caucus been larger in the state Senate, Kaine may very well have pulled off a repeat performance of Mark Warner's 2004 tax hike.

Therefore, while it makes little or no sense to folks like us in the blogosphere who actually pay attention to these things, the Republicans are still perceived as the party of lower (if not necessarily low) taxes in Virginia - and in politics, perception is reality.

Furthermore, we can be all but certain that Governor Kaine is itching for a tax hike in 2008, and the elections, if they go well enough for the Democrats, can give him an excuse to push for one. The surprising Democrats' strength in the 2003 elections gave Governor Warner the momentum he needed to make his tax-hike push the next year. Kaine is hoping for the same thing - and the only thing that can stop him is Republican strength in November 2007.

If the GOP can keep its current numbers (or, if possible, even increase their majorities) Kaine's political momentum would be zero, as would any chance of a tax increase. By contrast, if the Democrats can gain seats (as they did in the House of Delegates in 2003), Kaine can (and local MSM will) spin it as support for a tax hike.

We can look to the very recent past for an example of this. Before November 2006, the national Democratic leadership hid their actual plans for Iraq under a bushel. The election was all about Mark Foley (remember him?), No Child Left Behind, and Hurricane Katrina. Only when the Democrats' Congressional majorities were safely in hand did Pelosi and Reid demand troop withdrawals in less than a year, while MSM insisted the "people had spoken" about Iraq.

Should the Democrats gain seats in the legislature (or, heaven forfend, actually win control of the Senate), we'll hear all about how the "people have spoken" for a tax hike - which as you may have noticed has been advocated by almost no one on the campaign trail. Republican victories this November is the only chance that this "mandate" for a tax hike will not happen.

Thus, while I certainly will root harder for some Republicans than others (and the right-hand column still has them listed in the "especially supports" list), the fact is, we need as many Republicans elected as possible. The more Republicans win, the lower the chance for a tax increase and spending binge.

That's why I gave the blanket endorsement to the GOP this fall.

A bleg for recent Webb Foot-in-Mouth incidents

2007-09-23T20:00:00.000-05:00

Before I began my hiatus, I had a running feature on this blog regarding Virginia's junior Senator, Jim Webb. I called it Webb's' Foot-in-Mouth Disease, and had fifteen exhibits prior to June 7 (my go-dark date). Due to the situations I was handling during the last three months, I haven't been able to keep track of Senator Webb as much as I'd like. So I'm throwing this open to the rest of the blogosphere. Feel free to nominate in the comments to this post any Webb moment that you consider an exhibit of Foot-in-Mouth. I'll take whichever ones I think worthy (no minimum or maximum) and add them in.

There are a couple of ground rules, however. First of all, no meltdown moments just for the sake of meltdown moments. That's not quite what I track, and besides, it's poaching on The Ward View's territory. Also, do not include per se his introduction of the amendment on troop deployments that was just recently defeated - that amendment was Exhibit Fifteen. However, any thing he said during subsequent debates on the amendment between then and now are fair game.

Those whose nominated incidents become exhibits will have my eternal gratitude, and proper crediting on said exhibit posts. Thank you all in advance.

Hillary and Obama voted to defund the troops, and I'm the only one who noticed?

2007-09-22T23:33:00.001-05:00

Well, I have to admit, you folks practically held the door open and begged me to come back by virtually ignoring the vote of the Feingold Amendment last Thursday.

Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say I was looking for an excuse and the rest of the local rightosphere let one fall into my lap.

Either way, after spending the better part of two months having to look for a new job, and more than a month adjusting to the added responsibilities of the job I now have - while navigating a number of personal and familial issues - I have a better idea of what my role in the blogosphere should be: reduced, but not eliminated.

So I am back - and I have a bone to pick with Senators Clinton and Obama.

Apparently missed in the MoveOn.org brouhaha, the Senate voted on an amendment presented by Russ Feingold that would cut off funding for American troops in June of next year.

Don't take my word for it - this is the exact text from the amendment (second column, assuming this Library of Congress link still works):

No funds appropriated or otherwise made available under any provision of law may be obligated or expended to continue the deployment in Iraq of members of the United States Armed Forces after June 30, 2008.

Now, Feingold does include the usual and useless "exceptions," such as: "targeted operations, limited
in duration and scope, against members of al Qaeda and affiliated international terrorist organizations" (the very "limited" operations that put us in so much trouble in the first place), and "training to members of the
Iraqi Security Forces who have not been involved in sectarian violence or in attacks upon the United States Armed Forces." While that sounds nice, it should be remembered that much of our recent success comes from helping Sunnis who switched sides after (1) being forced to witness the horrors of al Qaeda first hand and (2) recognizing we're just as worried about Iran as they are. Under Feingold's plan, that's all out the window.

In effect, this amendment does just what it initially says: defund our military operations in Iraq. After years of claiming to "support the troops," the 28 Senators who voted for this made it abundantly clear they have no real concern for them.

Who was among these 28? None other than the leading two Democratic candidates for President: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (roll call vote).

So the next time Hillary and Barack talk about "supporting the troops," remember this vote, always - and not just because it was the catalyst that brought me back.

I'm pulling up the drawbridge for a while

2007-06-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm not sure what to call what happened to me today - breakdown, breakthrough, whatever. I've simply come to the conclusion that I need to completely transform my life. I need to "unplug."

As such, I am shutting down the RWL for the time being. For reasons I can't get explain in detail right now, I need to clear my head and start all over again.

I can't say how much I appreciate the kind words and comraderie I have experienced here in the blogosphere; I will always remember it, and it will be the inspiration for me to come back, if I can do what I need to do for myself and my family (BTW, no one is ill, it's not like that).

Until then, au revoir,

The immigration bill hits a huge land mine (Updated)

2007-06-07T07:33:00.000-05:00

I have repeated claimed that the grand immigration fiasco will not pass. In the wee hours of the morning, the U.S. Senate (easily the chamber more friendly to this mess), surprised itself by adding an amendment to "sunset" the temporary worker program after five -years, effectively blowing up the whole thing (CNN):

A fragile compromise that would legalize millions of unlawful immigrants risks coming unraveled after the Senate voted early Thursday to place a five-year limit on a program meant to provide U.S. employers with 200,000 temporary foreign workers annually. (UPDATE: This paragaph largely vanished as the CNN story itself has been updated since this monring).
The 49-48 vote came two weeks after the Senate, also by a one-vote margin, rejected the same amendment by Sen. Byron Dorgan. The North Dakota Democrat says immigrants take many jobs Americans could fill.
The reversal dismayed backers of the immigration bill, which is supported by President Bush but loathed by many conservatives. Business interests and their congressional allies were already angry that the temporary worker program had been cut in half from its original 400,000-person-a-year target.
A five-year sunset, they said, could knock the legs from the precarious bipartisan coalition aligned with the White House.

In other words - Ka-boom!

Now, given that the vote was so close, the three-card-amnesty crowd will do their best to reverse it. Arlen Specter is already calling the move "correctable." However, as I mentioned before, the Senate is far more friendly with this bill then the House; so even if Dorgan's amendment is repealed, a similar one will likely pass the House of Representatives, forcing a conference committee where the bill could die a slow death - and that's assuming it passes the HoR at all.

Meanwhile, for now, this thing is in big trouble.

As an aside, let's give credit where it's due: every Yes vote was the deciding vote (roll call vote), including one of yours truly's favorite targets - Jim Webb. Every broken clock is right twice a day.

Careening toward denoument

2007-06-06T07:56:00.000-05:00

It appears Ben Tribett is calling off the dogs on Shaun Kenney. Either he is looking for bigger fish to fry (if you believe Ben, which I don't) or he didn't expect the blowback he got from Riley, Not O'Reilly at Virginia Virtucon, Shaun's brother Jason, and Shaun's friend yours truly.

So now, Ben is looking for the door (Not Larry Sabato): "By the way - as far as the beating up of Shaun Kenney- it should stop." Unfortunately, Ben is still getting a few things wrong (emphasis in original):

If you read all the articles the only time I attack Shaun is when he lies about telling me about the indictments in advance . . . we can be fairly sure that someone in the Grand Jury did NOT leak this information to Shaun directly. Shaun would be out of this entire thing if he would just say who told him about the date of the indictment. Other than that the only thing Shaun appears to have done wrong is mislead the media when they first called him about it. He'll recover from that once he comes clean and says who told him and when.

The only trouble with that is this: Ben still has presented no evidence that Shaun tipped him off about anything regarding in the investigation. The only thing Ben can show Shaun actually discussed were supposed efforts in the party to talk Mark Tate into dropping out of the Republican primary for the 27th State Senate District, something Shaun never denied.

Now, I don't expect Ben to say, "Oops! My bad - Shaun didn't give an indictment date," but if he really wanted this to go away, he should have edited out the insistence that Shaun "lied." All he had to do was make clear his view that Shaun was a "bit player," and that his real target - for lack of a better word - is Gillespie.

Either way, it's pretty clear Ben is waving the flag of truce (if not the white flag) regarding Shaun.

Communist Chinese poisoned toothpaste disguised as "Made in Mexico"?

2007-06-05T14:06:00.000-05:00

For years, the debate over the securing of America's southern border (i.e., the one with Mexico) has been about illegal aliens. Suddenly, Steve Janke has found a reason for us to be worried about something else - Communist Chinese poisoned toothpaste "Made in Mexico."

To recap, the Food and Drug Administration has already warned Americans not to use toothpaste sent from Communist China, due to the likelihood that any toothpaste from there has been poisoned. Colgate toothpaste, by contrast, is "Made in Mexico."

Or is it (SJ, emphasis added, link in original)?

The big manufacturers, such as Colgate, a division Colgate-Palmolive, make their toothpaste elsewhere. The tube I have says "Made in Mexico".
I should have left it there. Instead, I decided to do a bit of checking, and now I'm worried. Made in Mexico? If so, why would this very senior Chinese official, Cheng Siwei, brag about Colgate toothpaste being made in China for export to the United States?
PAUL SOLMAN: We were here to interview one of China's current top leaders, Cheng Si-wei, an economist in the 2,000-year-old tradition of Confucian scholar politicians. The author of 28 books, Vice Chairman Cheng is also known as the godfather of venture capital in China.
CHENG SIWEI: Yes. Some people told me, you know, average Americans, you know, they use actually now in their daily life, they use many cheap Chinese goods from morning to the evening; when they woke up, their blanket is made in China. When they wear shoes to go jogging, the shoes, Nike shoes, made in China.
PAUL SOLMAN: Nike.
CHENG SIWEI: Yes. And they use a toothbrush, it's made in China. The Colgate Toothpaste is made in China.
PAUL SOLMAN: Colgate Toothpaste is made in China?
CHENG SIWEI: Certainly. American people are really benefiting from cheaper Chinese goods.
That was in October 2005. Maybe that was once true, but is no longer true. Or maybe Siwei was lying, or just ignorant of where toothpaste used by Americans is made. Or maybe he's telling the truth -- that the toothpaste, or major components of the product, is manufactured in China and then repackaged or otherwise reworked in some way in Mexico as a final step, with Mexico therefore being identified as the country of manufacture.
Does Cheng Siwei know what he's talking about? He was Vice Minister of the Chemical Industry from 1994 through 1997, and is currently a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the de facto legislative body of the People's Republic of China. He speaks with the authority of the Chinese government.

These are questions that need to be asked. In the meantime, keeping Communist-poisoned toothpaste out of the United States may also mean keeping a better eye on Colgate's "Mexican" toothpaste, too.

Cross-posted to the China e-Lobby

Iraq's "civil war" is fought by foreigners

2007-06-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

The fact that the Washington Post has Robert Kagan as a columnist demonstrates its immense superiority over the New York Times (not that either can hold a candle to the Washington Times or the great New York Post, but I digress). Kagan's Sunday column took dead aim at one of the fallacies growing like a cancer in the American political right: that the problems in Iraq are all the Iraqis' fault.

First, Kagan explains why this excuse (and that's exactly what it is) holds so much power:

For Republican elected officials looking desperately for a way out of supporting a war that threatens their reelection, this has become not only the preferred excuse but also a necessary psychological crutch.
For these Republicans, even more than for Democrats, blaming the Iraqis solves a number of big problems. It absolves them of having supported the war in the first place. We were right to go to war, they will say, and we gave it our best shot. It isn't our fault if the Iraqis were unable or unwilling to do their part.
Blaming the Iraqis also allows Republicans to acquiesce in defeat without having to acknowledge that it is an American defeat. We didn't fail, the Iraqis did. And blaming the Iraqis clears the American conscience. We got rid of Saddam Hussein, Republicans will say. The rest was up to them, and they failed. The more sophisticated will declare that the Iraqis were culturally destined to fail.

A few paragraphs later, Kagan starts to take the excuse apart (link in original):

The fact is that, contrary to so many predictions, Iraq has not descended into civil war. Political bargaining continues. Signs of life are returning to Baghdad and elsewhere. Many Sunnis are fighting al-Qaeda terrorist groups, not their Shiite neighbors. And sectarian violence is down by about 50 percent since December.

Then Kagan detonates the excuse with this salient fact (link in original, emphasis added): "According to Gen. David Petraeus, upward of 80 percent of the suicide bombers are not Iraqis."

So, in addition to the "civil war combatants" not actually fighting one another, and the fact that both "sides" are in fact supported and funded by the Iranian mullahcracy, we now know that the overwhelming majority of the terrorists involved are foreigners.

This is a civil war? It looks at lot more like a slow-motion invasion to me.

Ralph Smith joins the endorsee list

2007-06-04T13:57:00.000-05:00

Many, many thanks to Jerry Fuhrman (From On High) for mentioning the 22nd District State Senate primary race between incumbent Republican J. Brandon Bell and Ralph Smith. Otherwise, I might never have noticed this (Roanoke Times):

Smith has focused his campaign largely on taxes. He's accused incumbent Bell of being a "RINO" (Republican in Name Only) who portrays himself as a fiscal conservative in election years but who votes for tax increases the rest of the time.
"The guy is so deceiving," Smith said. "Every piece of material he sends out tags him as a conservative fighting for your taxes. The guy did no such thing."
While it's true that Bell did vote for a 2006 transportation bill that, had it passed, would have raised the sales tax on wholesale gasoline . . .

Indeed, Bell did vote for the 2006 would-be-tax hike; this was one of the votes that led many in the 24th District to seek an alternative to Emmett Hanger.

Thus, Senator Bell must be retired, and I'm happy to join Jerry in supporting Ralph Smith for Senate. He takes his place in the hallowed right-hand column of this blog.

Teddy on Taxes

2007-06-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

I'll say this for Teddy's Truth (I prefer Teddy's Truthiness, but it's not my blog) - amidst the sludge aimed at us (BTW, Teddy, I'm a real person from Fredericksburg, not a "nameplate"), he does at least try to defend Emmett Hanger's tax hike votes. Scroll down a little from the blogart in Teddy's post and you get this explanation:

Hanger believes that a big part of being a Republican comes from understanding the importance of balancing the budget and in doing what is necessary to assure that core services are provided for.

Of course, this argument is hardly new; Andrew Clem tried a similar line earlier, and link Andy, Teddy sounds reasonable in the abstract. The trouble comes when actual recent budgetary history comes into play.

The fact is, when Governor Gilmore left office in January 2002, the biennial budget stood at $47 billion. The current biennial budget stands at $75 billion (Free Lance-Star), an increase of sixty percent over six years (three budget periods). The smallest budget increase, which came in Mark Warner's initial and "painful" budget, was still just shy of 10%.

In fact, the current budget is nearly $14 billion higher than the last one, a staggering increase of 22 percent.

So my question, to both Teddy and Andy (note to Andy: this is in response to your comment on my earlier post - a comment I must confess I did not notice until today) is this: Do you really believe funding "core services" required a 22 percent increase in the last two years? Do you believe it required a 60 percent increase over the last six?

If so, I simply can't take your claims to support limited government seriously.

Likewise, I can't take Emmett Hanger's claim seriously either.

Cross-posted to Bloggers 4 Sayre

Prediction

2007-06-04T07:00:00.001-05:00

I know the San Antonio Spurs are the better team on paper. I know they have more experience (three titles in seven years). I know they have the homecourt advantage.

I don't care.

LeBron James did it again Saturday night. He took what the Pistons gave him (rebounds and assists mostly) and the rest of the team stepped up (especially Daniel Gibson).

Meanwhile, the Spurs apparently decided not to double-team James in Thursday's opener (AP via WANE): "Spurs guard Tony Parker says rather than using double- or triple-teams, the Spurs are counting on (Bruce) Bowen to try to contain the high-flying, high-scoring James."

Unless Parker's throwing us a head-fake, the Cavs will win Game 1. Either way, I say Cleveland wins the NBA Championship in six games.

Feel free to laugh hysterically if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

It's Monday Morning, and all Ben T. has (still) are accusations

2007-06-04T06:48:00.000-05:00

Ironically, it appears the first person who applied the proper lesson of the 2006 campaign was the very blogger whose current fame is based in part on so many not learning said lesson.

That lesson being: it's never a story in the DC suburbs until it hits the Washington Post (or Washington Times), and the blogger that has managed to get the latest blogosphere bruhaha is none other than Ben Tribbett (Not Larry Sabato). I dealt with the crux of Ben's charges against Shaun Kenney (full disclosure, Shaun is a personal friend of mine) on Friday, but that was before the Post story. However, Ben says nothing in the Post to buttress his claims against Kenney. All he presents is a phone bill showing a call that Kenney himself acknowledges.

Allow me to say it again, as we enter the fifth day since Ben made his accusation against Shaun, he has presented no evidence to back it up. All he has done is make the accusation very specific, and throw in with Mark Tate. Also, he has yet to retract his assertion (since proven wrong) that Russ Potts had endorsed Tate' primary opponent.

Al Qaeda-in-Iraq's liaison to Iran is caught

2007-06-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

For all of you who insist Iraq is in the throes of a civil war, for all of you who feel the country has fallen into "sectarian violence," for all of you who insist Sunni and Shiite terrorists would never cooperate . . .

. . . please read the next three lines (Multi-National-Force Iraq via Bill Roggio in the Worldwide Standard, emphasis added):

Coalition Forces captured a suspected liaison to al-Qaeda in Iraq senior leaders, who assists in the movement of information and documents from al-Qaeda in Iraq leadership in Baghdad to al-Qaeda senior leaders in Iran.

Let me restate the last part: al-Qaeda senior leaders in Iran.

I have spent the last five months presenting the detailed evidence that al Qaeda and the Iranian mullahcracy were working together against us - and I'm not the only one (Bill Roggio). Yet almost no one seems willing to recognize this - neither the war critics (who would have obvious reasons to hide their heads in the sand) nor the war supporters seem willing to acknowledge that the Wahhabists, Ba'athists, and Khomeinists are allied with each other against America.

So will war critics please dispense with the idiotic myth that the violence is driven by "Iraqi hatreds" when it's clear Tehran and al Qaeda are conspiring to dupe, use, and ultimately kill as many Iraqis as they can? Can they stop pretending or hoping that Iraq was a "diversion" from the Wahhabist, Ba'athist, and Khomeinist War (otherwise known as the War on Terror) when clearly neither al Qaeda nor Tehran think it is? Can they stop blaming the Iraqi people for being the victims of an asymmetric version of the Hitler-Stalin carve-up of Poland? Finally, can they at last acknowledge that the American forces in Iraq are nobly protecting the American and Iraqi peoples against common, vicious, and bloodthirsty foes?

In short, will the critics of this war - the supposed "realists" of the world - ever acknowledge reality?

You take the kid to the doctor and all hell breaks loose (Winchester-Loudoun-Richmond Version)!

2007-06-01T07:51:00.000-05:00

Where do I begin?

Perhaps the disclosure is a good place to start: Shaun is a friend of mine. I actually met him in person before we interacted in the blogosphere. He's not perfect (then again, neither am I), but he's always been a good friend to me. So, to some extent, I take this a little more personally than most of the rest of the blogosphere.

Ben Tribbett (a.k.a. Not Larry Sabato) is insisting that Shaun was part of a broad conspiracy to smear and ruin Republican Senate Candidate (27th District) Mark Tate. Here is Ben's timeline of events (as he sees them). Virginia Virtucon has weighed in, as has Charlie Jackson at Leesburg Today. It is the latter who, however unintentionally, contradicts and undermines Ben's story.

This is how Ben describes Shaun's actions (emphasis added):

May 2nd- Shaun Kenney (RPV Communications Director) leaks to me that Ed Gillespie, Ken Cuccinelli, and Mike Farris all have asked Mark Tate to drop out if his indicted. He also gives me the date of May 22nd when Tate will be indicted. I put the update to this post up (no names crossed out at the time- see below for why)
. . .

May 2nd, 7:39 p.m.- Shaun, not knowing I had already talked to the Cooch, sent me this email: "A little birdie says that if Ken is asked point blank if he advised Tate to back out, he’ll confirm"

. . .
May 3rd (Office Hours)- I call Shaun Kenney back in response to his email and tell him I already talked to the Cooch and that he made no such call
. . .
May 30th (Afternoon)- Local media contacts Shaun Kenney and he denies speaking to me since the "anti-semitic flyer" and "macaca" last year. He especially denies talking to me on May 2nd.
May 30th (Evening)- I forward emails showing he was lying about that contact.
May 31st- Kenney's story changed when reporter calls him back.
May 31st- Article comes out around 5 p.m. with numerous quotes showing differences in Kenney's story between the yesterday and today.

Sounds pretty damning, except that Shaun never made any such denials. Here's what the Leesburg Today reported that Shaun originally said on May 30th (emphasis added):

On Wednesday, Kenney denied having any contact with Tribbett, who operates the Web site Not Larry Sabato, concerning the investigation into Tate.

In other words, Shaun only denied talking to Ben about the Tate probe, he did not claim he wasn't on any speaking terms with Ben. Thus, Ben's supposed rebuttal e-mail doesn't rebut anything - and once again, we can see that in the same Leesburg Today piece (emphasis added):

But an e-mail, provided by Tribbett, indicates Kenney communicated with that blogger on May 2 concerning Tate. That e-mail from Kenney to Tribbett, which Kenney acknowledged Thursday, suggests that a "birdie" said state Sen. Ken Cuccinelli (R-37) would confirm for Tribbett that he had called and asked Tate to withdraw from the senate race. Kenney declined to say Thursday who his "birdie" was.

The importance of this paragraph (which followed immediately the citation directly above it) is what was not mentioned. Nowhere did the LT's Charlie Jackson write that the e-mail predicted an indictment date; neither was a mention of the probe reported to be in this e-mail. I find it hard to believe that Jackson, if he had evidence revealing Shaun has talked about the actual investigation (which would contradict Shaun's denial), would keep it to himself or cloud it in this verbiage.

In other words, the e-mail in question almost certainly does not discuss any particulars of the investigation, and thus Shaun's denial has not been contradicted, and what is more, Shaun did not change his story. Ben's generating a lot of smoke, but there is no fire here.

Meanwhile, Ben managed to make a huge mistake on this earlier this week, claiming that Russ Potts (the outgoing Senator in the 27th) "just made an endorsement" for Tate's Republican primary opponent (Jill Holtzman-Vogel) by calling on Tate to withdraw. In fact, three days after Ben made that post, Potts made abundantly clear that he did not endorse Holtzman-Vogel (Washington Post - emphasis added):

Potts says he is considering endorsing a Democrat to replace him.

That's hardly an endorsement of Ms. Holtzman-Vogel.

Now, I'm not prepared to cast aspersion on Ben - yet - but he does have a checkered history when it comes to the facts. Perhaps he's reading too much into this e-mail (that's my guess, since the reporter himself didn't read as much into it as Ben did); perhaps VV is right in claiming that Ben "is looking to take down RPV and Shaun Kenney all in an effort to advance an opportunity for Democrats to win a state senate seat." What I do know is that Ben has, to date, shown nothing that would impugn Shaun's integrity (let alone finger Shaun as a part of this supposed anti-Tate conspiracy), and if Ben has anything else he isn't revealing, he'd best do so now, or post a retraction ASAP.

You take the kid to the doctor and all hell breaks loose (Valley Version)!

2007-06-01T07:03:00.000-05:00

Well, the Hanger people apparently learned all the wrong lessons from last year.

Their latest attempt to drag Hanger across the finish line now apparently includes digging up info on Scott Sayre's wife, and using a blogger (namely, Myron Rhodes) to get the information out. Moreover, when an outside blogger (Virginia Virtucon) calls him on it, Myron resorts to physical threats.

How could it come to this?

Now, I learned my politics in New Jersey, where the only rule of politics is: if you believe in rules, you've already lost. So I'm not really surprised that this has come out in said fashion, but Myron's response to criticism tells me this really is an act of desperation. The surprising part is that Hanger, or his people, or just Myron, actually believe this will work.

Folks, I can't emphasize this enough, but blogs do not and likely will not ever have this kind of power. At best, we can comment on campaign, call out erroneous and biased reporting, or present new arguments and angles. Too many bloggers have ambitions of being reporters; when in fact, the pundit is the model we should follow.

Instead, everyone wants to be this year's "macaca" blogger; never mind that there wasn't a "macaca" blogger last year (as I've said earlier, anyone who still thinks the blogs carried that story must never have heard of the Washington Post).

As for yours truly, my endorsement of Sayre still stands. The travails of Mrs. Sayre do not erase Emmett Hanger's votes for higher taxes. Scott Sayre is better on the issues, period.

I am a witness

2007-06-01T06:11:00.000-05:00

At some point today, I will (or at least I hope I will) comment on the various nuttiness that descended upon the primaries in the 24th and 27th districts, but I would be remiss as a basketball fan to stay silent on last night's Cavs-Pistons game.

In a word: unbelievable.

With just under two and a half minutes to go, the Pistons had a four point lead (84-88); from there, LeBron James went on a 7-3 run to tie it.

That's right, LeBron, all by himself, scored the seven points Cleveland needed.

The legend grew in the two overtime periods. In the first, the Pistons scored nine, and LeBron scored nine.

That's right, LeBron, all by himself, scored the nine points Cleveland needed to stay in the game.

In the second overtime, LeBron scored nine again, in the following fashion:

A fadeaway twenty-footer (yes, you read that right) with a hand in his face . . .

A behind-the-back dribble to create space for a twenty-two-footer with Chauncy Billups still recovering in time to put a hand in his face . . .

A fadeaway three-pointer while he was triple-teamed . . .

. . . and finally, with the score tied at 107, LeBron drove through four defenders for a layup that would be the final points of the game.

Final: Cleveland 109, Detroit 107

For the last 12:18 of the game, equivalent to just over a regulation quarter, LeBron scored all of his team's twenty-five points, and outscored the Pistons by himself - in fact, all by himself - by a score of 25-19.

I now believe (despite all logic screaming to the contrary) that LeBron and the Cavs could win a championship this year. Yes, I'm saying he can beat San Antonio. No, I don't know how; then again, I still don't know how he did it least night.

Fact is, LeBron could be on the court with me, Shuan Kenney, Ben Tribbett, and Waldo Jacquith as the starting five, and we'd still make the playoffs.

He's that good folks.

He's that good.

The Dems fall right into the trap

2007-05-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

Now it's time for some actual analysis on what the Democrats' nomination of David Cox means.

I should note that I observed a primary somewhat similar to this two years ago when Shaun Kenney tried to knock off Delegate Robert Orrock. The local Democrats had someone waiting in the wings, but largely kept the would-be nominee there. In the end, the Dems never put a candidate forward; I'm guessing it's because they didn't think Orrock would go down (he won by about eight points in the primary).

In this case, however, the Democrats have decided to go "above ground," and not only put forth their nominee (Cox), but had him rip Scott Sayre up one side and down the other. It was left to former Senator Frank Nolen to go after Hanger. From this, I can draw a couple of conclusions (admittedly from afar).

The Democrats think Sayre will win: They wouldn't have bothered with a nominee, let alone finding someone to push aside the would-be tax-cutter Will Hrovat, if they thought Hanger would pull this out. Cox will have little, if any, appeal to Sayre voters if Hanger wins. Moreover, a Democrat running against Hanger would put some local Dems in a pickle. Clearly, this is a scenario they don't see coming.

More to the point, the Dems want Sayre to win: The strategy the Democrats are employing is right out of their Republican-primary-reaction playbook - run a candidate who will supposedly appeal to those who voted for the moderate primary loser. Of course, Cox will run no matter what happens, but no Democrat outside the 24th will care as much if Hanger is renominated. Conventional wisdom holds that Hanger is tougher to beat than Sayre is (said conventional wisdom is wrong, but I'll get to that later).

Local Democrats know this as much as anyone else, which bring us to the most important point, Hanger cannot rely on a single Democrat to support him in a primary: The partisan Dems won't be looking at the primary choice as the lesser of two evils (as many did in the aforementioned Kenney-Orrock race), they'll be looking at the best chance to take the seat. That will mean sitting the primary out, or for the more Machiavellian types, actually voting for Sayre in the primary (note: in the land of my birth and upbringing - New Jersey - cross-party primary sabotage was routine).

So will the Democrats win the seat if Sayre knocks off Hanger?

No.

As I've mentioned before, the presence of Liberatarian Arin Sime throws a monkey wrench into the Democrats' plan, for reasons I mentioned earlier:

Sime will have to oppose Sayre from the left, in which case he and the Democrat will be fishing in the same pond. So in a general election, Sime and the Democrat will battle for the liberal minority while Sayre has the conservative majority all to himself, and as such, he (Sayre) will cruise to victory.

This is why I have always considered Sayre the stronger general election candidate than Hanger. As I expected, most Democrats disagree, including the Democrats in the 24th. So thanks to their mistake, Scott Sayre is not only better positioned in the general election, but the primary election as well.

Cross-posted to Bloggers 4 Sayre