RedStateEclectic

State of Southern California? County Supervisor Mulls Secession

The secessionist bug has bitten Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone.

An excerpt from The Desert Sun's Political Insider:

Stone, a Republican, just unveiled a proposal to have Riverside and 12 other counties split from California and create the new State of South California.

[...]

“Our taxes are too high, our schools don’t educate our children well enough, unions and other special interests have more clout in the Legislature than the general public. It has to change.”

Besides Riverside County, the new state would include the counties of Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono.

I strongly approve. As a resident of Riverside county, I am going to send him a note showing my support for this proposal.

Here in Nebraska…

…we have the makings for a very interesting Senate race.

A little background is necessary:

• Democrat Ben “Cornhusker Kickback” Nelson, is up for re-election.  The Republicans REALLY want to end his political career.
• Because he is possibly weakened (remember, he was a two term Governor before being elected to the Senate in 2000.  He won his first election against then-Attorney General Don Stenberg (remember that name) by less than a 2 point margin.
• In 2006, he won re-election against then-political newcomer Pete Ricketts (who now serves as Nebraska’s GOP National Committeeman) by over a 12 point margin.  Ricketts, for those Cubs fans amongst our readership, is one of the owners of the Chicago Cubs—his dad founded TD Ameritrade, and the family amassed a tidy sum of money in the process.  Pete has since become a major player in conservative/economic libertarian politics in the state, founding the Platte Institute and helping to fund several other organizations. 

Now, the players this year are interesting, as several are jumping into the water to try and take Nelson out.  Just sort of an aside: Ben Nelson irritated a lot of people in Nebraska with the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback”, but I suspect that in the end (if, indeed, Nelson runs—he hasn’t announced formally yet), that whoever wins the primary race will find it a much higher hill to climb than they now think—Nelson has been around a long time, is a “born and raised” Nebraskan, has won statewide office 4 times (2 as governor, 2 as senator), and is the ONLY Democrat holding office above the legislative level in the state (i.e., the Dems won’t let him fail without a mighty battle).

Right now, there are 5 people in the race (and apparently, some of their supporters have decided to support several of them…):

• Patrick Flynn has been in the race the longest—having filed his paperwork back in late 2009.  He had run for the nomination (but lost) in 2008.  He hasn’t held elective office before, is an investment adviser, and seems to be making some inroads with some elements of the “tea party” crowd here in the state.
• Don Stenberg (remember, I told you to remember that name), is the oldest guy in the race (although not really all that old—early 60s, I think).  He’s been around Nebraska politics forever—he was active in the GOP when I was in high school 35 years ago (guess he must not have been as much older than me as I thought at the time), and served for several terms as Nebraska’s Attorney General   In 2010—after 8 years in the private sector, he ran for State Treasurer, and won, and within a short period after taking office as Treasurer in January, announced that he was running for the Senate (after Governor Heineman announced that he would NOT be running for the Senate).
• Jon Bruning became Attorney General in 2002, after serving for two terms in the Nebraska legislature.  He won re-election un-opposed in both 2006 and 2010, although his fundraising efforts seemed to remain healthy.  He announced for Senate early, as well.
• Last week, Spencer Zimmerman announced that he was running. He’s a young man (I think I saw somewhere that he was 31), and has a long history of running for offices in different parts of the country—including Wisconsin.  He doesn’t have (that I can find) a website besides his Facebook page, and on the surface, it would seem that his primary platform is to create a unicameral national legislature…
• On Tuesday, State Senator Deb Fischer jumped into the race.  She’s from the Valentine, Nebraska area of the state—way out west, where there are more cattle than people; Bruning and Stenberg are from the Lincoln-Omaha corridor (“urban" Nebraska), as is (apparently) Mr. Zimmerman; Pat Flynn is from a mid-size town (by Nebraska standards—small, I suppose, to the rest of the world) in an area of the state that sort of bridges the suburban-rural divide. 

I have no idea how this is going to turn out.  I’m pretty sure that Zimmerman won’t win—he’s too young, and has no history.

Beyond that, the smart money would probably have to be on either Bruning or Stenberg—Bruning has been piling up endorsements (by groups like the Tea Party Express, and from people like Mike Huckabee), but Stenberg has a history that pre-dates Bruning’s political life, and he’s got a real record to show as both a fiscal and social conservative.  Flynn is something of an underdog, although he might have a shot, in a highly competitive 3-way race between Bruning, Stenberg and Fischer.

At least three of these candidates are coming to speak at our Heartland LibertyFest on August 6 (Bruning, Stenberg, Flynn—Fischer has been invited, but hasn’t responded yet).

This will be a nomination race worth watching—although whether it’s a nomination worth winning is yet to be seen.  Never underestimate the political skills of Ben Nelson.

Mark Halperin Calls Obama A D*** On Live TV

Snicker.  I love it when the liberal elites start picking each other apart.

Seriously, how dickish do you have to be to lose the Harvard crowd?  I'm not sure, but Obama seems to be there:

 

 

Of course,  seeing as how he's a managing editor at the uber-dickish Time Magazine, it's likely that Halperin's real problem with Obama is that he's not a happy, smiling socialist. But at least he's somewhat consistent.  In 2010, Halperin wrote that

...the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle. 

Does it occur to anybody else that a person has to be a dick to even want to run the whole country?  The job comes with the knowledge that you're never going to please everybody, so you eventually will have to screw the people that that disagree with you. That is, unless they can screw you first.

Harassing the Harassable

Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs. – P.J. O'Rourke

The Cost of War

According to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute, the first ten years of this perpetual war ran us about 4 trillion dollars.

There’s also a video you can watch which is chock full of brainwashed soldiers, warmongering neocons, and even one of the Watson Institute’s very own professors, who presents us with an alternative to war spending: domestic spending! Yep, we get a better bang for our buck when we buy votes spend money on “education, health care, and weatherization”. 

The most striking part of the findings, however, didn’t have to do with the money or the politics. For me, it was this one sad and reflective sentence:

For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since.

Of all the attributes this nation possesses, it seems we can’t list compassion among them.

The Government Would Lie to Us? No. Way.

Exposed documents reveal Napolitano, TSA lied about safety of cancer-causing naked body scanners

Here’s some of the best, but click above for the whole article:

Amid the string of emails discussing the matter, an undisclosed sender explains that NIST was "a little concerned" over Napolitano's public reassurances that TSA's naked body scanners are safe. After all, NIST does not test products, and it never tested the naked body scanners in the first place. Napolitano apparently took the individual machine dose measurements that NIST had gathered and twisted them to say what she wanted them to say, which was that the machines are safe.
You can view a partially-censored copy of that email exchange here:
http://epic.org/privacy/backscatter...

Worse, NIST had actually warned DHS and TSA that the machines were not necessarily safe, and that airport screening agents should avoid standing next to them because of the harmful radiation they emit. It is unclear whether or not this warning was ever taken seriously by TSA officials.

Napolitano also falsely claimed that research conducted by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory confirms the safety of naked body scanners, even though the research actually suggests the opposite. Dr. Michael Love from the school publicly stated that the machines are going to give people skin cancer, and the specific findings of the report indicate that "radiation zones" around the machines emit enough radiation to exceed the "General Public Dose Limit."

It Still Inspires

A Soldier on the Presidential Yak

 

No, not that yak.

Some excerpts from the latest post by Commander Jeff Huber, whose commentary at his Pen and Sword blog I always find worthwhile to follow:

As distasteful as I find the agenda of the political right, I’m inclined to sympathize with their desire to rein in the totalitarian tenor of Obama’s reign, but impeach the guy?  Come on.  Not even Denny Kucinich has a serious notion of doing such a thing.  In the age of the New American Centurions, we don’t impeach presidents for taking us into illegal wars.  These days we only impeach presidents for their inability to keep their orbs and scepters in their pants.

We’ve been in a constitution crisis since 1950 when Harry Truman committed us to a full-blown war in Korea that ended in a negotiated tie with a foe that still flares up on us like a wicked case of facial herpes.  The constitutional crisis Obama has created is just another twig on the pyre of our republic.  And after the Bush and Cheney administration flushed shame and irony and truth and accountability and the bill of rights all the way to the Congressional Cafeteria, who will ever impeach anyone for anything ever again? 

Nor is it likely we’ll ever be able to vote the warmongers out of office.  If you’re not sharing a pillow with the war profits machine you don’t get elected. [...]

The only way I see the public start demanding that we extract ourselves from what even Uncle Bob Gates admits are “wars of choice” (he’s “wary” of them now that he’s all but ensured that they never end) is if prominent political and media figures start stating in unvarnished patois that the likes of Obama and Gates and Mullen and Petraeus are using our troops as pawns, not to preserve our nation but to preserve the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us would acquire “unwarranted influence” over government policy if we allowed it to. 

The entire article.

Also see Defining Away Aggression, adorned by the image of another animal quite capable of a load of bull.

Thomas Passing Tuxedo Junction

The fabulous Robert Murphy has a nice piece at the Mises Economics Blog on Thomas the Tank Engine, which was among my absolute favourites as a kid. Maybe you like to read it, while the Glenn Miller Orchestra performs Tuxedo Junction, which actually refers to a streetcar junction in Birmingham, Alabama.

  

Ron Paul Hires Pollsters

From Gary Howard, national press secretary:

LAKE JACKSON, Texas – The campaign of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has scored a major coup with the hiring on of heavyweight GOP pollster Fritz Wenzel, and his polling firm Wenzel Strategies to run its polling operations.