Ted Kennedy's seat

[Peter]

Ba'al Chatzaf wrote:

I find it interesting and troubling that the word "devout" precedes the word "Objectivist". The word "sincere" or "convinced" I could understand. But "devout"?

end quote

It disturbed me too. I used to think it was funny for someone to call me a Randoid or a cultist. It was cool like wearing the sign of the dollar. I don’t anymore. I now wear an American flag lapel pin or tie tack. He or she should leave that language behind. I used to quote Rand a lot more than I do now. I try to put Objectivism into my own words.

"I swear, by my life and by my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man; nor ask another man to live for mine"

—Ayn Rand—

The quote was meant as a funny contradiction to what I just said. But now that I look at it, it needs work, like the Star Trek phrase “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” became “To boldly go where no one has gone before,” when Jean Luc Picard said it.

"I swear, by my life and by my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another person; nor ask another person to live for mine." That’s better. It’s one of those things I think Ayn might agree with if she were alive today.

Like Barbara Branden, I think Ayn would also rethink some of her pronouncements about psychological matters. A woman President, for instance.

Or saying that someone is the way they are because of early life choices and value judgments. That needs to be tweaked. Someone’s brain may be hardwired to be a certain way, that has nothing to do with value judgments at the age of three. The way their brain is, is the reality. Some things cannot be programmed or reprogrammed, only sharpened as with athletic ability. I have a maximum vertical jump level within me that I can achieve with practice, but I could never dunk a basketball.

Peter

[Peter]

We are going to win. The paradigm shift is occurring, as observed in the following article. I gave my last pledge yesterday to the RNC, as it exists today. A promise is a promise, but they now know I am a Tea Party supporter, which is, for me Randian Government. DON'T TREAD ON ME!

2010 should bring some smiles to the virtuous, and gray-faced despair for the Fascist Democrats and the Me-Too Republicans. I hope I will never again have to choose between an Obama and a McCain.

The cut out mentioned below is funny. They had a stuffed suit in a chair, but the cut of head shot was way too small, making the guy look like a pin head.

The Tea Party Movement needs some slogans, like Drill now, drill here. Any suggestions?

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter

TIA Daily • January 26, 2010

FEATURE ARTICLE

"We're Comin' to Get You"

NY-23 and VA-5

by Robert Tracinski

Following Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts and the collapse of the Democrats' statist agenda in Congress, the greatest danger to the Republican Party is complacency, a sense that they are destined to be swept back into power in November.

In fact, the most brutal bloodletting in the near future may be within the Republican Party itself. The same "tea party" rebellion against big government that swept a Republican into power in far-left-leaning Massachusetts is also bringing forth insurgent challengers against establishment Republicans in the party's primaries. You can see that in the new poll that shows challenger Marco Rubio pulling ahead of Charlie Crist in the Republican Senate primary in Florida. Crist is no aloof, entitled Martha Coakley; he's a personable campaigner and a popular governor. Yet his support for President Obama's free-spending "stimulus" bill earned him the enmity of the "tea party" patriots. And in the last year, it is the tea party movement that has wielded the decisive balance of power in American politics.

I recently landed in the middle of another important skirmish: the wide-open Republican primary battle in Virginia's fifth congressional district. The story is a microcosm of the tension and mutual suspicion between the tea party movement and the Republican establishment.

As a resident of the Charlottesville area—Charlottesville is at the north end of VA-5—I have been involved with the Jefferson Area Tea Party group, and they asked me to be the moderator for the first of three tea-party-sponsored debates for the fifth district Republican candidates. (See video of the event on YouTube or listen to podcasts from WCHV, the local conservative talk radio station.)

In stepping into the role of moderator, I got a quick education in the political conflict within the right as it is playing out on the ground.

Among the tea partiers and the grassroots, there was already a sense that the party establishment was attempting to anoint a candidate from above, putting its thumb on the scale for Robert Hurt, a state senator from the south end of the district. Hurt has already been backed by House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, whose safe seat in the seventh district makes him a big wheel in Virginia GOP politics.

But like Crist, Hurt has a record that leaves him open to the charge of being a weak-kneed moderate—most notably a 2004 vote in the General Assembly for a $1.4 billion tax hike in the budget proposed by Democratic governor Tim Kaine. Hurt supporters point to his conservative record on other issues and dismiss this as "one vote from six years ago." But it is important to realize why that vote looms so large.

The situation Hurt faced in 2004 is precisely what a freshman Republican congressman from the fifth district will face in 2011: congressional Republicans will be pressured to support higher spending and higher taxes for fear that "we will be blamed" for causing a legislative impasse. That's precisely what President Clinton did in 1996, it's what President Obama will probably do next year, and it's what Tim Kaine did in 2004. The tea parties want a candidate they can trust not to cave in under that kind of pressure. What they don't want is a congressman who acts like a beaten dog and doesn't believe he can win this kind of fight.

In December, the dissatisfaction of the grassroots with the establishment boiled over into a battle over whether the party should select its congressional candidate in a convention or a primary. A convention has its problems. Attendance at a convention is not necessarily representative of the district and could end up selecting a marginal candidate—the guy whose supporters are not the most numerous but the most fanatical—who ends up being weak in the general election. But a primary is seen as favoring Hurt, the well-funded, establishment-backed candidate. The fifth is a sprawling, mostly rural district where it is difficult to advertise without buying airtime in multiple markets, so a primary favors the candidate with more money and name recognition. And with six other candidates challenging Hurt from the right, the fear is that the non-Hurt vote will be hopelessly splintered, allowing him to gain a plurality while winning only a minority of the vote.

The whispered fear in the back of everyone's mind can be expressed in brief code: NY-23. That was the special election in upstate New York last year where local Republican Party county chairmen selected a liberal Republican state legislator, Dede Scozzafava, as the candidate to replace an outgoing Republican congressman. This invited a third party challenge from a much more conservative candidate, and the resulting internecine conflict ended up splitting the vote and getting a Democrat elected.

There are a lot of differences between VA-5 and NY-23. Hurt is far to the right of Scozzafava, there is no existing third party infrastructure (as there is with the Conservative Party in New York), and the candidate will not be selected by a bunch of old men in a smoke-filled room—there will be a primary on June 8. But here's where there is a similarity: if the non-Hurt vote is splintered and he wins with a minority of the vote, this could invite an independent challenge in the general election, either from one of the six rejected primary candidates, or from popular former Republican congressman Virgil Goode, who has not ruled out a run.

It is regrettably normal in an article like this to mention the establishment candidate—and then not mention the names of the six other challengers, which merely exacerbates the advantage given to the establishment candidate. So let me name the other challengers: Mike McPadden, Jim McKelvey, Ron Ferrin, Ken Boyd, Feda Morton, and Laurence Verga. And since I'm giving everyone's website, here is Senator Hurt's.

The incumbent, Democrat Tom Perriello, has no business winning re-election. He was voted into office in 2008, the best year for Democrats in three decades, by a margin of less than 750 votes. With the swing back to the right in the last year, he ought to be finished—unless the vote on the right gets split.

In this environment, you would think the establishment candidate would be assiduously courting the "tea party" grassroots, gaining their support or at least blunting their opposition. You would be wrong. Until recently, Hurt has been driving most of the tea party groups away.

Which brings me to the debate I moderated on January 22. According to debate organizer Mark Lloyd, of the Lynchburg tea party group, he initially secured Hurt's commitment for this date back in November, going out of his way to accommodate Hurt's schedule in the General Assembly. But then later the Hurt campaign started to make sounds about backing out, which they did officially a few days before the debate.

I'll admit that as moderator of the event I might be biased, but I think this was a huge political error. Grumblings were already in the air that Robert Hurt cared more for the endorsement of the party establishment than for the approval of the grass roots, and this seemed to confirm it. The explanations from the Hurt campaign have been vague and frankly unconvincing. Campaign manager Sean Harrison told me on Tuesday that Hurt didn't attend because of "prior legislative commitments," but it's hard to imagine what these would be at 7:00 pm on a Friday, on a day when the General Assembly ended its session at 2:00 pm. And I wasn't able to get a clear answer from the campaign about what Senator Hurt actually was doing that evening that was more important than the tea-party-sponsored debate.

In short, the grassroots concluded that Hurt was deliberately stiff-arming them. One example alone will give you an idea of the reaction of the tea party grassroots. Charlottesville tea party activist Carole Thorpe, who very ably managed the logistics of the event, stayed up the night before making a cardboard cut-out of Senator Hurt, which she placed in one of the seats at the forum as a visual reminder of his absence. It was such a striking image that the Charlottesville Daily Progress put it on their front page—a big picture on the middle of the front page, above the fold.

The Hurt campaign seemed to think he could skip the tea party event and no one would particularly notice or remember. Instead, everyone who even glanced at the front page of the local paper knows that Robert Hurt blew off the tea party movement. For a Republican politician running for office in the Year of the Tea Party, that's a political debacle.

I've heard from the local tea party organizers that the Hurt campaign has suddenly become much more conciliatory towards them, making a firm commitment for two future tea-party-sponsored debates. But the damage has already been done. And meanwhile, Hurt's competitors got the field to themselves to increase their name recognition and woo the support of the tea partiers.

Do not underestimate the impact this could have on the race. The tea party movement has mobilized a large number of totally new political activists. The two organizers of the January 22 debate are typical. Neither is or ever has been a professional politico; Mark Lloyd is a manager with a well-drilling company, while Carole Thorpe is a stay-at-home mom and amateur thespian. Both have long-standing political convictions, and both have been involved in politics in a low-level, sporadic way, volunteering at phone banks or polling places. But now they find themselves putting in countless hours organizing candidates' debates and trying to influence congressional elections. This is a vast new outpouring of previously dormant political energy, motivated by the sense that they can really make a difference for the cause of liberty.

But the fear among the tea partiers is that the Republican establishment still doesn't get it. It has the instincts of any establishment: it is afraid of any competing base of power that is too cantankerously independent and unpredictable. I get the sense that many of them view the tea parties as loose cannons, as interlopers who are interfering in the normal process of political succession within the party. They don't realize that this is a year in which an endorsement from the party establishment doesn't work for you—it works against you. Hurt's campaign manager recently told me, for example, that the idea of friction between the tea parties and the party establishment is a "figment of the imagination" of the rival candidates. But I can tell you firsthand that it is real, and the Hurt campaign's reluctance to acknowledge it merely reinforces the impression that they are out of touch with the grassroots.

At the January 22 debate, Mark Lloyd described what the tea party movement means for the existing political establishment. Referring to Scott Brown's recent victory in Massachusetts, he said, "If you paid attention to what's happened this week, there's just a little message to those in the government, in the established parties: we're comin' to get you."

The tea party supporters are people who want to support the Republican candidate—and boy do they want to defeat Tom Perriello. But they have been disappointed too often by Republican politicians who toe a small-government line in Farmville (and yes, that really is the name of a town in the fifth district) while voting for bailouts and big spending when they get to Washington. As candidate Mike McPadden put it, "We had a conservative movement in 1994, and it was over in six months. In twelve years, while the so-called conservatives ran our House of Representatives…look where we are after 12 years from 1994 to 2006. Are we better off? No, we are not…. We will get it right this time, if we send people to Washington who are serious about cutting taxes and cutting the size and growth of government."

The Republican establishment needs to wake up to this message in time and show that they really are listening and responding to this pro-free-market, pro-liberty groundswell.

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[Selene]

Short and to the point:

"Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts on Wednesday demanded to be seated immediately, saying that while he was set to be sworn in Feb. 11, there are a number of votes scheduled prior to that date -- votes that, once he is seated, Republicans can defeat.

Democrats, seeking to avoid a prolonged battle over seating a duly elected senator, quickly assented."

http://www.washingto...-seated/Brevity is the soul of...

Adam

It's the people's seat!

Edited February 4, 2010 by Selene

[Chris Grieb]

I'm glad he taking the seat. He should done it sooner. This was disappointing.