Pledge Break

WSJ:

Gingrich Refuses to Sign Anti-Gay-Marriage Pledge

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to sign Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats’s anti-gay-marriage pledge, saying through a spokesman that it had a long list of problems.

Mr. Vander Plaats already made one change, removing a sentence that suggested African American children fared better under slavery.

“We told him that we couldn’t sign it in its current form,” said Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R.C. Hammond. “We’re happy to work with him to get some more precise language.” Among the problems? “It was too long,” said Mr. Hammond. He declined to specify the problems, but said, “The concerns were across the board.”

Mr. Gingrich, an outspoken critic of gay marriage, was in the Hawkeye State Monday at an event hosted by Mr. Vander Plaats’s The Family Leader. The pledge’s signatories promise to oppose gay marriage, pornography and Sharia, or Islamic law and support marital fidelity. In an interview last week, Mr. Vander Plaats said his pledge was in no way a slap at Mr. Gingrich, who has been married three times.

“We all understand we fall short of high standards,” Mr. Vander Plaats told Washington Wire. “What we want to do is recognizing growth going forward.”

Mitt Romney is loath to sign any of these “pledges.”  As far as that goes, he and Gingrich both are blind squirrels that occasionally find acorns.  After the clusterfuck that was the previous Van Der Plaats petition that included slightly laudatory language about slavery, no Presidential candidate is going to want to put his or her John or Jane Henry on any pledge ever again.  It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that some leftist in good enough disguise might torpedo Republican candidates into signing a “pledge” with a real poison pill buried 87 pages deep.  Or maybe a rival intra-party candidate is secretly paying a real conservative group to trick his or her rivals within the party to sign a goofy pledge to bork their credibility, or hoping they won’t sign it so they can run to the base and question their “conservative bona fides” and their “purity.”

There seems to be a cottage industry of Republican and conservative oriented groups that spend all of their time concocting pledges for political candidates to sign.  When there is a contentious Republican Presidential primary field, the people in this industry come out of the woodwork to earn their saltiest salt.

I happen to think that pledges are the coward’s resume enhancer.  Do you think Ron Paul needs to sign a pledge for us to know what he is about and what he would do as President?  No, because he has a long and clear (yes, Obama, perfectly clear) record.  Presidential candidates usually sign these “pledges” because their real record is less than conservative, and they think signing one conservative pledge will cover up ten “moderate” House or Senate votes, or ten “moderate” major initiatives or actions as Governor.

A nubile running for his or her first dog catcher public office, fine.  But by the time you run for President, you should have an established record such that these dorky pledges are unnecessary.

Questions:

1.  Where are all the Democrat Presidential candidate pledges?  Where is the cottage industry of leftist interest groups demanding that Democrats running for President sign them?  When have Democrats running for President signed such pledges?  Why is it that only the conservative/Republican interest groups demand Republican Presidential candidates sign these pledges, and why is it that only Republicans running for President think that signing a piece of paper gives them credibility among the base?  I think the ultimate answer is because leftist voters have a lot more confidence in a typical serious credible Democrat Presidential candidate than their analogues on the other side of the aisle, because the Stupid Party instills a lot of disappointment in people.

2.  Who and how do you sue if a candidate violates the substance of a signed pledge once in office?  Does contract law even cover this?  Is it even applicable?  I highly doubt it, because the person who wins a political race doesn’t usually get anywhere near 100%.  If, e.g. Rick Santorum signs a pro-life pledge as a candidate, gets 51% of the national popular vote and wins, then vetoes a pro-life bill, can the pledge authors sue President Santorum?  What of the 49% who didn’t vote for him because they’re not pro-life?  If I sign a contract with you to buy a widget, all that is necessary to fulfill the contract is I give you money and you give me widget.  Nobody else needs to get involved.  Politics and elections are games of margins.  This is another reason why pledges rank underneath toilet paper as a good reason to kill trees.

Monday’s Musings

Malik Zulu Shabazz doesn’t understand that the pen is mightier than the sword.  Obama would rather kill off white America with a thousand strokes of an ink pen than a hundred million bullets.

*  P-D had a long spread over the weekend about the closing of the Corvette plant in North St. Louis in 1981.  They mostly dance around the taboo racial truths about why it closed.  I have told you in this space before that GM opened its replacement automobile manufacturing facility in Wentzville, thinking it was far enough away so that many of the black workers wouldn’t follow GM out that far, but many did, and Wentzville has a mini-ghetto to this day for it.  As it turns out, (read the last four paragraphs of the third major section), a lot of the black GM workers from the North Side also followed the Corvette manufacturing when it moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky.

*  In related news, a semi-conservative black man writes in the CST that the black middle class has taken a big hit in the Hopeychangey Era.  He uses two metrics to prove his point — Unemployment, and declining net worth.  The unemployment spike among the black middle class can be explained partially for the same reasons why the white middle class is bumming (outsourcing, insourcing), and partially because a good chunk of the black middle class’s job base was built on affirmative action quicksand.  As far as “net worth,” the decline in housing values is the main driver, mainly because real estate was bid up so insanely high because of the public/private mania for affirmative action subprime mortgages, of the no down payment/no income verification/ephemeral credit check variety.  Sans those mortgages, the blacks wouldn’t have been able to “buy” those houses, and real estate wouldn’t have gone on the stratospheric jump that it did in the middle of the last decade.

*  Proving once again — You can have liberty or you can have equality, but you can’t have both.

*  I can’t remember how, but DSK’s replacement at the IMF, Christine Lagarde, has some vestigial links to Obama, those links fueling speculation that the recent DSK scandal was at least in part an Obama- and Sarkozy-ordered hit job .  If my memory isn’t fooling me, then her call for the United States to increase its debt limit is nothing more than her being a vicarious Obama mouthpiece.

*  Chris Hanson hoisted on his own petard, maybe a little bit?  Surely, his paramour is not an underage girl, but it gives me an opportunity to go into the archives and dig up my post of about four years ago why both I and Michael Savage thought that his “stings” of child molesters was at least a bit creepy if not counterproductive.

*  They say the House always wins.  But even when you win, you wind up losing anyway, especially if the “House” is anywhere near the “Ghetto.”

*  Goad covers APS.  Here’s the money quote AFAIK:

For comparison’s sake, I selected an elementary school at random from Rabun County and one from Atlanta that had been featured in the governor’s report. The hilljack school is as overwhelmingly white as the Atlanta school is black. Their respective zip codes’ median household income is roughly the same, although the blacks earned a trifle more skrilla in 2009—the year before the governor sent in monitors to oversee the testing.  Fifth-graders in both schools scored almost identically in 2009’s standardized tests. The only two major statistical differences were that the inner-city black kids received nearly $3,000 more yearly in educational funding than the rural Deliverance kids, and 51.4% of the black classrooms were flagged for high wrong-to-right testing irregularities, while the trailer-trash kiddies’ tests showed zero cheating. So in order to achieve testing parity with those toothless inbred hillbabies, Atlanta’s black kids needed an extra $3,000 in funding and had to cheat their goddamned asses off.

*  The county jail of Christian County, Missouri, between Springfield and Branson, is occupied at well over capacity.

One may be tempted to think that the reason is that Christian County has an abundance of young men that like to play high school pranks involving blow-up balloon sex toys, but it’s a little more existential than that:

The Christian County jail houses about 50 federal inmates.  It has a contract with the U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.  Although that adds to the population it’s also the only way the jail makes money.

Christian County has only a tiny Hispanic population, but the Hispanic population all around southwest Missouri in general is growing, especially in towns like Noel and Monett and Carthage where there are chicken plucking plants.  That said, if the county government incurs any extra expense, then it can always go after Tyson et al — After all, the Hispanics are there because Tyson et al trucked them in to be their cheap labor.

*  The judge in the Casey Anthony case defended his decision not to release the names of the jurors who found her not guilty of the most serious charges because he was worried about their physical safety.  One told the media anonymously that she is going to move out of Florida just in case she does get found out and the rabid-mouths kill her in earnest.

Funny, some of the same ilk of people who are subconsciouly endorsing or at least not denouncing this “wave of hate and threats” against jurors were the same people who said that there was a “wave of hate and threats” against leftist judges who made leftist rulings.

By the way, I think Casey Anthony did it, (mainly circumstantially because who else would have wanted to and had the ability and motive?), but the jury came to the right decision on the serious charges because the prosecution didn’t have a good enough case.

*  Good idea.  But the Federal courts will never allow it, because the “disparate impact” of such a system will be something that seems like or is very close to racial segregation of inmates.

Et Tu, Obama?

Daily Beast:

Just 48 hours before his premier gun-fighting agency took a public flogging in Congress last month, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a memo that escaped much public notice but left federal prosecutors with an unmistakable message.

People who buy guns at U.S. shops with the intent of secretly transferring them to someone else–a tactic known as “straw buying” that is at the heart of the Mexican border violence–should face new, stiffer prison sentences, Holder declared.

“We encourage every district to carefully review recent enhancements to the Sentencing Guidelines that are aimed at straw purchasers,” said his memo, which was personally initialed by Holder.

Fine.  But here’s the hangup — It’s really hard to demonstrate enough probable cause for straw purchasing to get the legal right to arrest someone for it.  Proving it in court is even harder.  I doubt the number of convictions for straw purchasing every year is very high.  Therefore, these “tougher sentences” are just a PR smokescreen, and a distraction from F&Fgate.

A new reporting requirement that federally licensed gun shops report any person who tries to buy two long-arm weapons near the Mexican border over a five-day period.

“Reporting?”  Then what, Obama and Holder’s ATF will go ahead and let the guns walk south into Mexico.  More razzle dazzle em distractions.

About that — isn’t this racial profiling?  That’s Obama’s and Holder’s DOJ’s party line in its lawsuits against state level immigration crackdowns.  They don’t want you to report illegal aliens who are apprehended near the Mexican border, in fact, you even noticing sneaky Hispanic looking people near the Mexican border heading north is, five, six, seven, eight…RACIST.

Reporting is Such Hard Work

Channeling the words of the author of the newest addition to my blogroll.

WCCO-CBS-4 Minneapolis:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A Minneapolis mother is looking for the public’s help in finding a mob of teenage girls that she says assaulted her family.

The attack happened Thursday afternoon inside Folwell Park on Minneapolis’ north side.

Shawnee Twiet says she was in and out of consciousness when the attack happened.

“As soon as I hit the ground, I just started feeling just everything coming from everywhere,” Twiet said. “I mean blows coming from the back of my head. I felt somebody grabbing the back of my hair.”

She suffered a black eye, bruises all over her body and imprints on her back.

They tell us that she gave a description to the cops, but they won’t print the description in this article.  There’s hint number one.

Hint number two:  Twitter.  I’ll leave that to Unamusement Park.

Hint number three:  NYT Census Explorer.  Filter to “black population,” and zoom in and around the areas around Folwell Park in North Minneapolis.  You’ll see a lot of dark blue corresponding to majority black census tracts, even though Folwell Park’s own census tract isn’t so heavily black.

Let’s punt the ball, now:

Twiet, however, does not want to see the teenagers that she says assaulted her family behind bars. She wants an apology.

She also wants the young ladies to perform community service, so they can learn to help others, instead of hurt them.

Puke gag.  Now there’s that Minnesota progressivism we all know and love.  If it happens again to her and her alone, I won’t be quite so sympathetic.

UPDATE 7:25 PM:  “John C.” writes:

add some extra snark by pointing out the weak use of the Queen’s English near the end of the story where the reporter wrote “Twiet, however, does not want to see the teenagers that she says assaulted her family behind bars.” Was her family behind bars when assaulted? sorry reporting and sorry editing.

Thanks, but I want to give snarky credit where snarky credit is due.  Hence the attribution.