Florida is volatile, this cycle: the combination of redistricting, the adding of two seats, and the status of Florida as a battleground state has caused for a lot of jockeying for positioning and seats.  It was pretty much a relief to speak to Col. E.J. Otero, USAF (Ret.), who simply wants to toss out the liberal Kathy Castor from the 11th district. As usual, we talked about CPAC and this race.

Col. Otero’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane

This particular interview with Richard – we’ve talked with him before about the race – is of interest for another reason: Dave Weigel of Slate happened to reference it in his day-in-the-life article about Richard Mourdock at CPAC.  I don’t have any actual beef with Weigel’s reporting of anything that I was involved with – I did ask those questions, more or less, and I was ready to get started on the entire interview rodeo – but it may prove instructive to see the difference between the interview, and the way Dave described it.  Nothing pernicious, but interesting.

Said interview is below:

…and Richard’s site is here.

Moe Lane

One of the interesting things about CPAC is, of course, that you can meet a whole lot of different candidates.  Below was my conversation with Dan Bongino, who is a former US Secret Service agent now running for Senate in Maryland against Ben Cardin – and if you don’t remember who Ben Cardin is, don’t worry.  Cardin’s an amazingly generic Senator who, on his good days, aspires to be as memorable as Herb Kohl.

Anyway, Dan and I talked a bit about CPAC and the race below:

Dan’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Right to work issues, mostly.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

And tremble at their might!

They have tents, you see. Tents which they carry with them, everywhere that they go. For JUSTICE!

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Open thread. These goofballs aren’t even worth a full post.

This is from yesterday: Karen Harrington is goig up against Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who doesn’t quite have the district that she used to. We’ve talked before, and she had some thoughts on CPAC this time:

Karen’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

I have a lot of these, and probably more getting generated tomorrow – but I didn’t want to not get at least one of these done this evening.  This clip is of Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who of course came out of nowhere in 2010 to neatly excise Russ Feingold from his Senate seat.  Which was personally one of the more satisfying results of the last election cycle: partially because Feingold’s assault on free speech was a constant irritation to me, and partially because the best presents are often the ones that you weren’t expecting.

At any rate, the Senator and I spoke briefly about CPAC.  Check out the video.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

…and the plan is plenty of interviews. It’s definitely an interesting mood here, so far: kind of a sense that things have not yet been… resolved.

If you’re here, stop on by Blogger’s Row and say hi. Particularly if you’re running for office, down to and including your local school board. There’s no such thing as an unimportant race.

The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these. This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were profiting unduly from legal insider trading*. I call it ‘legal’ not in the sense that there was nothing wrong with said insider trading; I call it ‘legal’ because Congress exempted itself from the rules that the rest of us have to follow. The distinction is important. It’s perfectly legal for, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein to buy into a biostock company just before the company picks up a fat government subsidy check, even if she knew about it ahead of time. That’s the problem.

Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO. Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO, right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa got somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal. And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans. By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it.

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In today’s Morning Jolt Jim Geraghty observed, while implicitly dismissing former (involuntarily) Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s (D, PA) sudden getting religion over Obamacare for the cynical political move that it probably is, that the myth of the conservative Democratic Congressman was, well, a myth – and that he’s been saying that since 2010. Well, I’ve been saying that, too – so I decided to look at all the examples of so-called conservative Democrats found in that article, and where they are now. The results were amazingly gratifying:

• Bart Gordon (forced to retire, 2010)
  
• Bobby Bright (removed, 2010)
  
• Dan Boren (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Gene Taylor (removed, 2010)
  
• Heath Shuler (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Joe Donnelly (switching out to lose Senate race, 2012)
• John Barrow (going out fighting [cruelly redistricted], 2012)
  
• S.H. Sandlin (removed, 2010)
  
• Walt Minnick (removed, 2010)

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The entire article by Albert Hunt is possibly a bit too snide about various Republicans, but this part is at least on-point about Obama’s behavior at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner:

Obama hates such dinners. Some of his aides, in particular his political adviser David Plouffe, urged him not to spend an evening mingling with the 1 percent. Yet he chose to go, and attendees said it was the first time they could recall a speaker leaving before the other side had its fun. In addition, Obama’s 87-year-old predecessor was present.

Imagine the criticism five years ago if President George W. Bush had walked out on a dinner before Hillary Clinton spoke, with Bill Clinton in the audience.

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Could be, could be:

The Racine County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate possible fraudulent recall signatures collected by Mark Demet, a Racine man whose brother’s signature was found four times on petitions to recall Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine. His mother’s signature was also found twice.

But both say they didn’t sign, said Capt. Thomas Lamke of the Racine County Sheriff’s Office.

This is, by the way, a felony: and if this guy is convicted of it then I recommend the full fine and jail time.  If that sounds overly harsh, well, nobody is out there forcing people to fraudulently sign other people’s name to official election documents.  For that matter, it’s long since past time that somebody got it through Wisconsin progressives’ heads that their petulant collective refusal to accept that they lost an election doesn’t actually give them an excuse to do whatever damage that they like to civic structures in their home state.  It’s a heck of a thing to have to use felony convictions to drive that point home, but then, if you want to train a jackass the first thing you have to do is to get its attention…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics is one of the better analysts of basic political trends out there, so I was looking forward to his new book The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs – and Who Will Take It. I was fortunate enough to snag a review copy for RedState, and found it to be a fairly persuasive argument that our general assumptions about the implications of any given election are usually wrong. It was not exactly a groundbreaking argument for me, but then I’m already familiar with Sean’s writing on RCP.

Sean makes three claims in The Lost Majority:

“First, that the 2010 midterm elections were a result of Barack Obama and the Democrats misreading both their mandate and how they had been brought to power, imagining a realignment in 2008 when, in fact, none had occurred. Second, that the emerging partisan majorities described by theorists from both parties are mirages. Third, that the entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlies much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.” (page xiii)

The first claim is not exactly going to be controversial to anybody who isn’t a Democrat; the second and third are perhaps more likely to be matters of some controversy to ideologically-minded readers. They should not, however, be dismissed out of hand; after all, there were a lot of very book-smart people advising the Democrats in 2009 and 2010 who based their opinions on the belief that long-term partisan majorities are inevitable and that alignments are possible The collapse of their models should at least be seen as cautionary.

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…why are none of them talking about Operation Fast & Furious? And when I say ‘talk’ I mean ‘bringing it up at every opportunity, complete with raised voices and angry tones.’

Seriously. This is an easy issue to be on the right side of: everyone agrees – now – that it’s bad to create a sting operation where you facilitate the running of guns to Mexican narco-terrorists without proper safeguards (or indeed any safeguards at all); everyone agrees that it’s bad when guns that you’ve facilitated turn up at the murder scene of a US Border Agent; and while everyone may not agree that Attorney General Eric Holder is either a blithering incompetent or a malignantly corrupt callous bureaucrat, certainly virtually anybody who will be voting in the Republican primaries does.  As Mark Hemingway notes here: this should be a slam-dunk issue for a Republican candidate.  Particularly one who, I don’t know, might want to shore up his conservative credentials?

Hint, hint.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

The topline number in this Pew survey shows that the current breakdown among registered voters is 43/48 GOP/Dem, which is a seven point shift from their 39/51 results in 2008. Now that alone should worry the Democrats, seeing as Pew found that the breakdown in 2010 was 43/47, which was the year where Democrats got shellacked across the country; but the news is if anything worse when you look at the breakdown by religious affiliation. A lot of attention will be on how Jewish support for the GOP went from 20/72 to 29/65 between ’08 and today; but what may be even more important is that that GOP support among white Mainline Protestant and white Catholic voters flipped from 45/45 and 41/49 in 2008 to 51/39 & 49/42 in 2011. How this will translate into likely voters is, of course, anybody’s guess… but if you’ve been wondering why the President is suddenly talking about how neat God is, it’s probably because somebody on his staff is keeping track of Pew.

As to how this breaks down in the 2012 election… well, obviously the increase in Jewish support (as Pew notes, those new supporters are identifying as Republicans, not as Republican-leaning) is going to have an impact in Florida, which is a state looking increasingly like it’s going to be leaving the Democratic column. But possibly what may be even more important was what happened with Mormon support: it went from 68/19 in 2008 to 80/17 in 2011. If I had to guess as to why, I suspect that this represents fallout from the incredibly racist* Democratic response to California’s Proposition 8; and if you’re wondering what the point is then I suggest that you look at this map of LDS population percentages in 1990. Mormons make up somewhere around seven and a half percent of Nevada’s population, and while the numbers are much smaller in Colorado and New Mexico they are still significant. While Obama comfortably won all three states in 2008, they are all considered in play for 2012: couple that with Republican gains among white Catholics and we’re seeing a suddenly-rickety Democratic position in the Mountain West.

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And it sounds like it’s not to run for Governor of North Carolina, either.  The relevant text:

This was not an easy decision. However, I am confident that it is the right decision. It is a decision I have weighed heavily over the past few months. I have always said family comes first, and I never intended to be a career politician. I am ready to refocus my priorities and spend more time at home with my wife Nikol and two young children.

Translation: redistricting had doomed Heath Shuler, anyway, and it’s a bad year to be a Democrat in North Carolina.  Just ask Bev Perdue.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Man, Charlotte’s going to be all kinds of fun during the Democrats’ convention this year, huh?  Whose idea was that, anyway?  Joe Biden’s?  It kind of feels like a Joe Biden kind of decision.

The Democratic Senator from North Dakota is taking the position that The Budget Control Act (the formal name for the agreement that raised the debt ceiling) totally counts as a budget. While the idea of a federal budget that only takes twenty-eight pages to describe is actually kind of intriguing to me, the fact remains that the summary tables of an actual federal budget are larger. More to the point, in a budget you get an idea of:

• How much money is coming in;
• From where it’s coming in;
• How much money is going out;
• And where the money is going.

Guess which of the two documents has that information? Spoiler warning: it’s not the document that Senator Conrad is touting as being a budget.

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And I wish that I had been there to see both the Democrats and the three-person judicial panel bug their eyes out at Texas’s lawyer when he calmly pointed out that any hypothetical screwing over of minority Democrats when it came to redistricting took place not because they were minorities, but because they were Democrats. I don’t know if that argument’s going to actually fly with the courts, but it must have at least rocked them back on their heels to have somebody simply admit that, yes, the Republicans dominate Texas right now, the Democrats don’t, and these facts have consequences.

As to how this will all play out… well, the USSC’s instruction to the San Antonio court trying to come up with interim maps still holds: show more deference to the state legislature’s maps. Despite the fact that they’re probably going to be rejected anyway; and the deadline for new maps is going to be February 6th, on pain of delaying the primaries yet again. I’m starting to understand why Michael Williams is assuming that there won’t be a primary in April…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

This should have gone up last week, but illness intervened.  You may remember Jackie from last cycle: she came incredibly close to to defeating incumbent Joe Donnelly in IN-02.  Since then, redistricting has resulted in a more Republican-friendly street, and Donnelly has since announced that he’s retiring in order to lose this year’s Senate race.  We talked about that, a bit about what’s changed (and what hasn’t changed since 2010, and I ask her a ‘gotcha’ question!

Well, it’s a question with more teeth than you might think.

Jackie’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

There’s been a lot of commentary, obviously, about the information found in the latest Department of Justice Friday afternoon email dump with regards to the administration’s catastrophic Operation Fast & Furious. For those who need a reminder, OF&F was a program by which political appointees in the Obama administration ignored federal rules and basic common sense in order to facilitate the illegal resale of firearms to Mexican narco-terrorist groups. This was not done so much without proper safeguards as it was done with essentially no safeguards at all; and the program only stopped when OF&F guns appeared at the murder scene of Border Agent Brian Terry’s. Since then, the Justice Department in general – and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular – have been spinning this very much as their careers depended on it, going to far as to claim that they were unaware of the very problem until about the same time that it entered the public consciousness.

These emails contradict that narrative: as of yet, however, they do not convict the Attorney General of being anything except a slack-jawed mouth-breather who was and is so intellectually incurious that he apparently spends his entire work day locked in his office, rocking back and forth on his chair, and humming tunelessly. Or, to break the monotony, occasionally drool.

While this defense may seem undignified of Holder: hey, it beats going to jail.

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