CannonBall Run to the Political Graveyard

This kinda makes up for Lindsey Graham. Two years ago, Cannon had a strong challenger, and was able to turn it back.  Then and now, the only difference between Cannon and his primary challenger was immigration, as Cannon is conservative on almost everything else.  I think the reason why Cannon won two years ago and lost now is that the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” battle happened last year, and he probably pushed for it heavily and in public.

By the way, it’s too bad that my “best blogging friend” down in Louisiana seems to have fallen off the grid, because I could have returned the gloating that he emitted two years ago when Cannon won.  Meanwhile, yours truly now has two frequently-updaed blogs, proving that my way is better.

Boris Baby

Red Ken ousted, Boris Yeltsin Johnson will be the new Mayor of London.  This marks the second time within a week that the left has lost control of cities that are European capitals.

The BNP made significant gains in the London region, and even more start gains in other parts of England.

Sorry. I Do Take This As a Harbinger.

Yesterday’s results in IL-14 special election:  Foster 53%, Oberweis 47%.  Democrats are crowing because they picked up Former Speaker Hastert’s seat in a district that President Bush carried with 55% of the vote in 2004.  Republicans are blowing it off as an isolated incident.

I agree with the Democrats.  The reason I do is that John McCain raised money for and campaigned for Oberweis.  I have said in this space that the Republican Party might disappear after 2008, simply because of McCain and his liberalism.  I have also said that the only way that any given Republican will save his or her own bacon is to denounce publicly their own party’s nominee.  Now we see the first morsels of evidence that I’m right — Jim Oberweis allowed himself to become hooked at the hip with John McCain, and he lost in a fairly safe Republican district for it.

By the way, Jim — your signature issue in your first two tries at public office was immigration, especially restricting it.  What the fudge are you doing embracing Mr. Open Borders Republican?  You might as well hang it up, because you can’t win anything.  As of now, your neck is hung with the noose of perennial candidate.

Of South Carolinians Named Lindsey

Something terrible happened to a South Carolinian named “Lindsey” over the weekend.  Here’s hoping that the more famous South Carolinian named “Lindsey” suffers a somewhat similar, if definitely not a violent fate, next June.

Punch chads, not slash necks, por favor.

And Polls Said That Landon Had a Chance to Beat FDR in 1936

Then, the problem was that many FDR voters didn’t have land line phones.  Now the problem is that those that do tend to screen their calls using Caller ID and answering machines, and young adults are increasingly using (unlisted) cell phones as their only phones, and they screen their Caller IDs as well.

What further complicates the matter with cell phones is that the area code of the phone may not reflect where the cell phone owner lives — with free long distance on most plans, area codes are increasingly irrelevant.  So the St. Louis Post-Dispatch could conduct a poll among Missourians, and some of those calls going to phone numbers that seem to go to area codes 314/636/573/417/816/660 might be to people that don’t live in Missouri.

This is why I take modern-day polls with a grain of salt.  The only “polls” that matter are the ones where people actually have to punch chads, pull a lever, touch a screen or fill in ovals.  Even then, if long-overdue and necessary reforms aren’t made, those are sometimes unreliable.

Missourians Know Best

Even though he’s dead, he’s leading the pack in Pro Bowl voting for his conference and position.  And I do have the moral authority to laugh here — I didn’t vote for the dead man in 2000.

America’s Last Elected President

Former KTRS talk host George Noory, who now holds down the former Art Bell empire, as Noory still does the national show from St. Louis a good percentage of the time, is seriously considering a Presidential Run in 2012, on a Lou Dobbs-style platform.

Now, if Noory actually does win the election in November 2012, and the ancient Amerindian prophecies, whose prophets he has had as guests on his show, about the world ending on a date that translates to December 21, 2012 on the Gregorian Calendar, are correct, then he would never be able to become President.

“Any Twosome” Newsom Wins Another Term

As Mayor of San Francisco.  He had no serious opposition, in spite of his affairs, booze, and his futile effort to enact gay marriage in San Francisco.  Or maybe he won because of those things.  If anything would have sunk him, it was his refusal to jettison the high school auxiliary to “Homophobia, Inc.”

What people don’t remember, especially people who were taken aback at his attempt to flaunt state law to wed homosexuals, is that when Newsom won his first term as Mayor four years ago, he was actually the more conservative of two credible candidates running.  The other one was an out-and-outright Marxist with a Spanish surname, who complained that the city needed to do more about the “homeless,” even though if you listen to Michael Savage for more than ten seconds, you’ll know that SF panders to the “homeless” (really, violent transients) in the worst way, in the areas of city-funded welfare payments, to leniency from the city’s cops, and in other ways.  And all that wasn’t enough for that particular candidate who lost (but not by a big margin) four years ago.

Tancredo Retiring From U.S. House

It looks like he’ll be challenging Ken Salazar for his Senate seat in 2010.

Aside from formally deciding not to run for another term of his House seat, this 2010 announcement is also the functional equivalent of TT dropping out of the Presidential race.   After all, if he were so confident in his Presidential campaign, he would know that he would have more important things to do in 2010 than run for a Senate seat.  That said, there’s a very good place for you Tancredo supporters to go.

There’s a Senate race in Colorado in 2008, to replace to retiring Republican Wayne Allard. I take TT’s decision to wait until ‘10 as clues that he thinks: (1) Congressman Mark Udall (D-CO) has that Senate seat in the bag, because (2) HRC will become President, win Colorado in the process, and Udall will ride her coattails, (3) Salazar’s vulnerable, and (4) By the time 2010 rolls around, two years of another Clinton Presidency will create a 1994-like hot iron climate for Republicans.

On Jindal’s Victory

This is not good news for us and the racial cause.  The neoconosphere, assuming (correctly, as it turned out) that Jindal would become Governor, was already pushing him as a Presidential candidate in 2016 (”our Obama.”)

The presence of Bobby Jindal as Chief Executive as one of the several states will serve as a racial distraction, and preclude the Republican establishment from abdicating and allowing the party to become an explicitly racial-populist-nationalist vehicle for public policy change.

In

No runoff. Though he got 34% of the vote in Orleans Parish, that was not good enough to win it. This probably means his effort to impress black voters was a failure.

Call me crazy (and I know a lot of you do), but I still think that, in time, Louisianans are going to have buyer’s regret.

As for the next rung down the latter of Gubernatorial succession, he didn’t make it; Mitch Landrieu won easily. And to think: Landrieu himself wanted to abandon (as it turned out) a comfy statewide office to be Mayor of America’s Baghdad. For the love of gumbo, man, WHY???

Interestingly, and cognizant of the recent saga in Jena, I checked out the results for LaSalle Parish alone. Their numbers for Governor were similar to the numbers statewide, but for Lt. Gov., Kershaw beat Landrieu by almost the same blowout margin that Landrieu beat Kershaw by statewide. This might tell us something about the suspicion that some upstate whites have toward Jindal, or this simply might reflect Kershaw’s demographic base.

Throwing Kurt Weldon Under the Bus Was a Bipartisan Effort

Washington Times:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III ordered an internal investigation into whether bureau agents interfered with midterm congressional elections by disclosing a corruption probe that undermined the re-election bid of Republican Rep. Curt Weldon weeks before the Nov. 7 vote.

The internal probe was disclosed in a Senate Judiciary Committee report containing the FBI’s written answers to questions posed by committee members.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, asked why FBI agents searched the office of Mr. Weldon’s daughter and a business associate three weeks before the elections.

The accusation here is that the FBI, and lingering Clintonistas therein, timed their official investigation of Mr. Weldon to sink his chances for re-election.

The trouble with that is that, while it’s partly true, in 2006, the FBI was run by a Republican White House. And Mr. Weldon, who made a name for himself by exposing the Able Danger scandal, (i.e. where American military intelligence’s AQ-spying unit of that name was forever hamstrung in their effort to discover terrorist plots by egalitarian crazies and their obsession with not “racially profiling”), which encompassed both the Clinton and Bush Administrations, wasn’t well liked on either side of the January 20, 2001 schism. The Bush White House had just as much motivation to throw him under the bus as the Clintonites did, and I think it was a joint effort — such an effort could not have been successful without White House participation or complicity.

Say Macaca

If you see a Casio Exilim digital camera nearby, watch your words.

Dutcholyatry

What would you call an American President that would use American military and economic might to topple white governments on the African continent, make the Monday nearest Martin Luther King’s birthday a Federal holiday, and sign an amnesty for illegal aliens that forever cost his political party the state in which he made a living and was a two-term Governor?

Right. Now why do most of the Republicans running for President think they want to be his carbon copy, so much so that they’re toppling over each other to convince voters that they’re more the R-word than everyone else?

My Take on the Retirement of Karl Rove-r-rated

I think I tipped my hand on that just with the title.

The Republicans and President Bush won elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004 in spite of Karl Rove, not because of him. Remember, Rove was one of the architects of the dunderhead “Hispanic Strategy.” Apart from Cuban-Americans, Republicans don’t get anywhere near a majority of the Hispanic vote anywhere.

With political consultants, advisers and strategists, especially Republican ones, pure merit and skill doesn’t necessary get you anywhere. If someone is the campaign adviser for a candidate that happens to win, then the political class will automatically assume that the advice had something to do with the victory. If someone is lucky enough to be an adviser for multiple winners, then the political class will assume that such a person is a genius and a mad scientist who knows how to engineer miracles, when the truth of the matter is that he was just lucky. In other words, and in most cases, strategists for big-time campaigns for big offices are those who simply bet on the right pony in lesser races most often.

There are exceptions. Lee Atwater, whom Karl Rove counts as a mentor, won for the Republican Presidential candidates in the 1980s a total of 133 states, and in the case of 1988, in a dramatic come-from-behind fashion. Part of that was skill (Atwater never flinched at the Southern Strategy), but part of it was taking advantage of circumstances beyond his control, and being lucky in that he was part of the Reagan campaigns and Bush’s first one, instead of Carter, Mondale and Dukakis.

There are honestly skilled political advisers out there. The trouble is, they don’t get the recognition like they should, because they happen to live in places where their kinds of candidates can’t win, or strategists higher up on the totem pole don’t like the advice they give.

Previous stories on this blog about Karl Rove

We Need a Constitution Party

Mannies:

The Missouri Constitution Party is continuing its effort to get on next year’s statewide ballot.

At the party’s state gathering last weekend in Jefferson City, ballot access coordinator Travis Maddox, the state party’s newly elected vice-chairman, reported that he was confident activists could collect the 10,000 necessary signatures by Sept. 17.

The party needs the signatures because it failed to collect enough votes in recent statewide elections to get automatic ballot access.

(snip)

Last weekend’s speakers including the Party’s national chairman, Jim Clymer, who focused on six major crises that he said the United States now faces:

“1) Unprotected borders; 2) Degeneration of culture; 3) Depreciation of the value of life; 4) The misapplication and increasingly oppressive nature of government; 5) Globalism; 6) A flawed monetary system and manipulated economy.”

There used to be a party that advocated these things.  They were called “Republicans.”

Otherwise, we need the Constitution Party on the ballot, to have an alternative to the two major parties, the Constipation Party and the Diarrhea Party.

What’s Next? Brad Smith Will Run for Secretary of State?

Corby Jones (left), former University of Missouri quarterback and currently a partner in a Kansas City law firm, is considering running for State Treasurer. If we’re going to start handing out statewide elected offices to former Mizzou QBs, then Brad Smith (right) will soon announce he’s running for something in Missouri.

Hazleton, Penn. Mayor Lou Barletta Is Reading This Blog

On May 16, in the aftermath of his winning both Republican and Democrat primaries in his bid to win re-election as mayor, I wrote:

Perhaps Mayor Barletta might want to consider a new and better job about an hour-and-a-half to the southwest along I-81, in another Pennsylvania town that begins with “H.” I understand that it’ll come open in 2010.

Today, at the We Hate Gringos Blog:

With the mayoral primary election behind him, Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta says he is giving a run for Congress ‘’serious consideration” and will make up his mind by the beginning of next year.

Barletta, who won both Republican and Democratic primaries in the Hazleton mayoral contest in May, said he is also contemplating a run for statewide office, such as treasurer, lieutenant governor and governor.

(snip)

That’s all reason for the GOP to feel bullish about their chances of unseating Kanjorski in 2008.

”A Lou Barletta gives you the opportunity to win this seat, which you just don’t get very often,” said state GOP spokesman Michael Barley.

This means that Pennsylvania’s Republican Party has a lot more sense than the National Party, something which one would doubt when looking at Sen. Arlen Specter.

Either Barletta is reading this blog, or he has the typical ambition of a typical politician to run for greener grass when he sees it.

Nigerians Still Don’t Get the Concept of Elections

Wrong political party

Day before election day, USA: TV ads are entirely solicitations for votes
Day after election day, USA: TV ads are entirely solicitations for prescription drugs

Day before election day, Nigeria: Machetes are expensive
Day after election day, Nigeria: Machetes are cheap

You can draw your own conclusions about Nigeria.

Swinging Singles

AFP:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Unmarried Americans are a growing segment of the population but vote less than their wedded counterparts in elections, tending to favor Democrats over Republicans, said a study published Friday.

Single Americans 15 years of age and older now account for 45.2 percent of the US population, against 34.4 percent in 1960, Women’s Voices Women Vote said in its study titled “Unmarried America 2007: America’s New Majority.”

I hope there aren’t many 15-year old married people. I hope there aren’t any 15-year old voters.

To See, Rather Than To Seem

Reuters:

Is a city closely associated with cowboys, family values and social conservatism ready to make history by electing a man who is openly gay as mayor?

Dallas voters will answer that question on Saturday as they choose between Democratic party-endorsed gay candidate Ed Oakley and nonpartisan Tom Leppert in a run-off race to replace outgoing mayor Laura Miller.

If Oakley wins, he would become the first openly gay man to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, according to the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a Washington-based gay rights group.

(snip)

“The global and even national view of Dallas is still stuck on the Kennedy assassination and JR Ewing. The image is of a deeply conservative city,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“But the city is much more cosmopolitan and while perhaps not exactly liberal is certainly more moderate than its reputation would suggest,” he told Reuters.

The reality is that of a deeply Hispanic city. Therefore, the pertinent question and issue for anyone who wants to be Mayor of Dallas is borders, not buggery.

UPDATE 6/17:  Oakley lost to businessman Tom Leppert, 58% to 42%, even as polls showed Oakley even or slightly ahead.  This must mean that Oakley ran over the radar screen, i.e. some people told pollsters they would vote for Oakley when they knew they wouldn’t, just to keep from coming across as homophobic.

Politics, Religion, and Him

I was considering other titles for this post like “Queen of My Double-Wide Capital,” and “Third Rate Campaign.” Louisiana does have a city named Vidalia, but it’s not near his native Kaplan, or his current residence of Duson.

Nevertheless, country music singer Sammy Kershaw wants Mitch Landrieu’s job as Lieutenant Governor.

As he is near Delcambre, perhaps his first public policy concern as a candidate should be this question about men wearing their pants too low.

Mythcaca

The Politico:

The Macaca moment has morphed into an official learning tool for the Republican establishment.

It’s right there, on pages 18 and 22 of an Internet guide from the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that its chairman, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), hopes will become scripture for the 2008 candidates.

Always assume you’re being recorded, and always record your opponent. The blogs — oh, scratch that — the Republican blogs are your friends, so use them for rapid response in good times and bad.

“The paradigmatic example of failure to do so is the ‘macaca’ moment,” reads the guidebook, referring to a remark last year by former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that was captured on video and sunk his reelection campaign.

Okay, it’s time to put to bed the myth that the “macaca moment” sunk George Allen. If you remember, during the height of the media hype over it, Allen had his biggest lead in the polls over Jim Webb. They dropped it because it was working politically opposite direction of the way they thought it would work, and the conventional wisdom when Allen was up by 13 points even during the height of “Macacagate” was that the Webb threat was over, and that Allen could get back to work designing those Presidential campaign yard signs.

Luckily for Webb, the election was in November, not September, and he had time to recover just enough to win.

So Far So Good

The first weeks of the Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy are evidently such a success that French voters seem to giving his party a parliamentary majority in this weekend’s elections.

So far, he has followed through on his immigration promises, and he continues to be a steady voice in opposing Turkey joining the European Union.

Anarchists “Xcel” In Not Knowing the Score

Minneapolis-St. Paul area anarchists are planning to crash the party when the Republicans convene at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Enter for the Republican Presidential Nomination Convention in the late summer of 2008. They’re upset that some people are actually pretending to enforce immigration law.

If the Republicans nominate an amnestyaire like Giuliani, McCain or Huckabee at that convention, the irony, not to mention the density of anarchists, will be so noted.

Missouri Republicans Are Forgetting an Inconvenient Little Fact

P-D:

JEFFERSON CITY — The Republican majority that controls the Missouri House has decided to pick a successor to Speaker Rod Jetton in September, 15 months before he leaves office.

Republicans say the unusual move will provide continuity and help them focus on keeping the majority next year, when all 163 House seats are up for election. But the move also has drawn criticism.

Jetton’s spokesman, Aaron Willard, said the future speaker wouldn’t “actually have any power. They’re just a speaker-in-waiting. It’s a chance to shadow” Jetton and learn the ropes.

Critics say the plan is unfair because it will deprive legislators elected next year from having a voice in choosing the House leader for 2009-2010.

What are they waiting for? Jetton needs to go now.

I agree with that last paragraph. Perhaps the current crop of Missouri Republicans in the state House will pick another race pandering liberal like Jetton or worse, and knowing that the House Republican leader would already be pre-ordained, this might preclude Missouri voters from retaining a Republican majority in the House in November 2008.

Otherwise, and notwithstanding that, it’s the height of arrogance to assume that other factors won’t arise, and the voters won’t hand the House back to the Democrats in 2008.

Academia’s Favorite Republican Means Wide Open Seat

Everything you wanted to know about Kenny Hulshof can be summed up in the fact that the new President of the University of Missouri system. I always knew he was a rat.

The Columbia Missourian is speculating (or more accurately, hoping) that Hulshof’s resignation from that seat gives Democrats a chance to win it back. The paper speculates on Republicans that might want to run, and unfortunately, they all seem to be from Boone County, where Columbia is. We already have, and are about to be free of, a Boone County liberal Republican.

The ideal candidate for the Republicans, in my mind, would be someone from the eastern fringes of the district, e.g. Warren or western St. Charles County, someone who is a St. Louis suburbanite or exurbanite, who thus will have had recent experience with the downside of racial diversity, and will be conservative on race issues. The last thing we need is another one of these “brotherhood of man” screwballs from mid-Missouri’s little red schoolhouse.

For Southern Heritage buffs, MO-9 contains Callaway County, which declared itself a “kingdom” allied with the Confederacy during the War Between the States. To this day, that area of the state is known officially as “Little Dixie,” and yes, it has that official title to the consternation of black state legislators who would never set foot in the county unless it were on the way between St. Louis and Jefferson City.

This Too Will Change, By Staying the Same

Bartholomew Patrick (”Bertie”) Ahern will remain Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), after today’s parliamentary elections in Ireland. Ahern represented the mainstream leftist party, though his margin of victory over the country’s mainstream conservative party was lethargic, and other leftist parties collapsed.

Thirty years ago, an Irish election wouldn’t have been internationally newsworthy, unless the words “bomb” or “IRA” were involved.

In fact, once upon a time, the Irish were so frowned-upon and such objects of bigotry and ridicule that the English invented the word “lumpenproletariat” just for them, and that the most prominent English man of letters in the late 17th/early 18th century could get away with writing a screed proposing the barbecuing of Irish children, such that not only was he not panned and arrested for “hate speech,” that essay was taken semi-seriously among the English political and social upper classes that it was used to invoke debate on Irish so-called “overpopulation,” and the very name of that essay would, in earnest, become a metaphor for proposing ridiculous solutions just to call attention to what the author thinks is an underestimated problem.

Today, with the world being computerized, and the Irish, not only in Ireland, but all over the world, having a particular talent for that sort of thing, this change in pattern of trade, technology and commerce means that the Irish have the world by the nads. Now it matters who wins election on that island, and people brake for, not spit at, those Celtic surnames.

The amazing part is that, as great of an economic boom that Ireland has seen, Ahern and his party didn’t win by a blowout margin. There must be some consternation underneath the radar screen among the Irish, and I’m betting the two issues are non-white immigration (they are part of the EU, and must abide by their insane “refugee” mandates), and abortion, which was legalized under the Ahern government, and before then, Ireland was the only white country in the world whose white population had at least a replacement birthrate.

It Must Be Election Season Again

Governor Matt Blunt and Attorney General Jay Nixon are trying to outdo each other in telling us how mad they are that the state Public Service Commission gave the go-ahead for Ameren UE to raise their rates by 3.4%. Then again, Blunt wants to be Governor again, and Nixon wants to replace him as Governor, and we’ll get to decide that question next year, so we essentially have our first campaign issue.

Nixon is talking lawsuits, though I don’t know how much success he thinks he can really have. For the record, four of the five members of the PSC were appointed by the previous Governor, Democrat Bob Holden. I doubt that if it were a Blunt board, the result would have been any different, but that could be a retort that Blunt himself could use if Nixon wants to make hay from it.

You Made Me, Promises Promises

AP:

NEW YORK - New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday accused Dell Inc. and its financial services affiliate of “bait and switch” advertising and failing to deliver on promised customer service.

Now this is rich. A politician is complaining about someone else breaking sales promises.