Posted on 04/08/2014 10:34:16 PM PDT by Syncro
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Disgusting to lose 4 State Senate seats in 2010!
Everybody tells us people in commie red states to “move”. Looks like Mooney took their advice. I can sympathize.
Different state but so close to his old territory, I don’t see it as a big deal but locals may feel differently. He’ll need strong margins in his neck of the woods to win the primary.
Heh. Just when I thought the "Tea Party Express" had found every way to show they're clueless.
I thought that Mathis, being a doctor who understands and can enunciate the problems with Obamacare, would be a particularly effective congressman from arguably the most conservative district in the nation. But a couple of days ago I read this post by the incomparable Quin Hillyer at National Review Online, and my opinion on Mathis has soured to the point that I probably would prefer whoever his runoff opponent is, given that honesty and forthrightness are indispensable traits in a representative:
Cheap Shots in Alabama
By Quin Hillyer
April 4, 2014 4:27 PM
Things are getting nasty, all from one direction, in what otherwise has been a mostly positive but vigorously contested Republican primary battle for a House seat in a deep-red district near Birmingham. The race involves numerous heavy hitters, and already is demolishing statewide primary fundraising records with two full months left before primary election day.
Anyway, a Tea Party–aligned candidate named Chad Mathis, a medical doctor, has been struggling to gain traction, in large part because several of the other candidates are demonstrably solid conservatives as well. So Mathis seems to be panicking. He’s out with a radio ad characterized by the local paper as letting his “claws come out.” In it, he takes shots at the four strongest other candidates, calling them a “gang of four” while lobbing various attacks at each of them — several of which seem dubious. I can’t vouch for the responses of three of those four, but the attack against Gary Palmer, longtime head of the conservative Alabama Policy Institute think tank, is particularly ludicrous and meretricious.
The ad accuses Palmer, without attribution, of once supporting hikes in property taxes. Based on earlier claims from Mathis, it appears the entire basis of this attack is a single stray comment in an old Palmer column that eventually the state will indeed need new revenue. The comment came in the course of an entire column devoted to opposing a package of tax reforms/revenue-raisers that then was being bandied about the state capitol. As any supply-sider can tell you, one need not raise tax rates of any sort in order to get more revenue. Jack Kemp himself was fond of saying that the way to cure deficits was by the government gaining more revenue — specifically from massively higher private-sector growth, not tax-rate hikes. As a supply-sider, Gary Palmer quite obviously meant exactly that, considering that the entire column was an argument against tax hikes.
As it was, I remember that issue very well, and was in frequent touch with Palmer that year, because I was writing editorials and columns for the Mobile Register about the state’s looming budget crisis. And Palmer was absolutely consistent: The state government, he said, eventually would need more revenue — but only about a third as much as the eventual ballot proposition called for. Palmer vigorously opposed the proposal at issue, saying that the way to create the new revenue was via economic growth. What’s more, Palmer’s entire career of more than two decades at API is one of a strongly anti-tax-hike supply-sider. In fact, he’s the one who fed me the data necessary when I advocated a local sales-tax cut in Mobile.
To run an ad accusing Gary Palmer, of all people, of being a tax hiker is as absurd as it would be to say the same about Arthur Laffer.
Any sentient follower of public affairs in Alabama knows that Palmer and API are low-tax advocates. Nobody with a conscience would dare assert otherwise. Chad Mathis ought to be ashamed of himself.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/375097/cheap-shots-alabama-quin-hillyer
Mooney wanted to run in the MD-08 even after redistricting made it Democrat-leaning, but Bartlett (who had no chance of being reelected under the new lines) refused to step aside, and Mooney chose not to run against his old boss. Bartlett lost in a landslide.
If Mooney is elected in the WV-02, he would become the first Hispanic to represent WV in Congress (Mooney is Cuban-American, with his mother having emigrated to the U.S. to escape Castro’s Communist regime).
Kwansman sounds good, but would he have a better chance of knocking off Kilpatrick than would Speaker Tobin? If Kilpatrick holds on this November, we may be stuck with her until 2022.
Nobody's right all the time.
And I take issue with the statement "always in the tank for Paulbots." Completely untrue.
Otherwise, thanks for your well thought out comments!
Your welcome.
I don't know, probably not given Tobin's superior experience. Tobin also has twice as much money as of the last report, I'm eager for the Q1 2014 data to come out, FEC filing deadline is April 15th.
Given he's in a major leadership position though I'm sure someone could list a bunch of reasons why he is a RINO. I don't know much about him. Just goggling his name with "RINO" leads me to a blog post that claims he's a "big fan of unions". He's gotten a lot of negative attention for a recent trip to Mexico.
Kiehne FWIT, has the most money of the three. He's the "not a career politician" candidate.
That’s unfortunate. A conservative running against other conservatives for a safe seat has a rare opportunity to focus on positive campaigning.
Shades of Vernon Robinson, though that is a much more extreme case. He lost me when he basically said that Virginia Foxx was a Hillary Clinton liberal, a bald faced lie. I probably believed him at the time but after she’d been there a few years, voting something like 97% conservative, well.....
National Review’s Jim Geraghty made a very good point in today’s “Morning Jolt” (his daily e-mail for which one can sign up for free) regarding the importance of a candidate’s actions matching his words:
“Positions Don’t Define Politicians, Actions Do.
Way back in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama was making statements like these, suggesting he wanted to seriously reform affirmative action, shifting it from a program that evaluated people based on race and instead evaluated people based upon income:
STEPHANOPOLOUS: Why should your daughters, when they go to college, get affirmative action?
OBAMA: Well, first of all, I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.
The nuanced position on affirmative action was a pretty important point in establishing Obama as a Democrat who wasn’t a down-the-line liberal. The media largely concurred with his self-definition as a pragmatist or a centrist; after all, he had defied the liberal line with his criticism of the increasing national debt as “unpatriotic”, his declaration to Rick Warren that he believed marriage was “the union between a man and a woman,” and his insistence that “we’re going to have to take on entitlements, and we’re going to have to do it quickly.”
You see where I’m going with this.
Here we are, seven years later; Obama has been president for five of them. He’s run up record amounts of debt, he’s announced his support for gay marriage, and there’s no sign that any entitlement reform will be enacted during his presidency. And affirmative action remains the same as it was before, as the Obama administration argues existing programs should remain in place as they are.
All the intriguing anecdotes and thoughtful interview responses in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to actual policy and decisions.
S.M. over at The Wilderness:
Barack Obama thinks his job is to lead the mob, not the country. When the mob dishes out justice, as they did with Brendan Eich, there’s nothing more for him to say.
Selfie!
Obama only speaks out when he sees something he disagrees with. That’s what progressive activists do. He doesn’t take to stage or podium and remind people of the protected First Amendment right of all Americans and that Eich’s contribution to political causes is important to the free political process of participation. As the Democrat Party binges on a Koch Brothers fueled narrative about millionaires owning elections with their wallets, they remained deftly silent about one private citizen, donating a mere one thousand dollars to the cause of his choice, a choice protected by the Constitution and upheld, repeatedly by the Supreme Court.
He adds, “Obama had absolutely nothing to do with Lois Lerner IRS targeting, which is why she talked about taking a job with his organization.”
We can scoff at Democrats, the media, and a few Republicans for so easily and credulously buying into the notion that a machine politician mentored by William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright would govern as some David-Gergen-esque centrist. (And we should! And we do!) But we on the right probably ought to remember this in a year or two, when a half-dozen or a dozen Republicans are going to tell us they’re the “real conservative” in the bunch. A lot of them will attempt to claim this mantle by running down the checklist of policy positions and declaring they agree with us on all or almost all of them.
That’s nice. But the promises and pledges might turn out to be the equivalent of Obama’s centrist stances and statements of 2007-2008. It’s much easier to forget a promise than to undo an action. To quote Congressman Bobby Rush, in a debate with then state legislator Barack Obama, when both men were competing for the Democratic primary for Rush’s seat in 2000, “Just what’s he done? I mean, what’s he done?””
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