Month: April 2015

Rep. Gary Banz intends to put our bill on the Senate floor a week from tomorrow.  Up or down.  They’re getting Article V fatigue in Oklahoma.  CoS is very active there, and has made as much progress as we have, amazingly enough.  There was talk of combining our two Resolutions.  A State Senator supported their bill in committee, but not ours.  There really is no rational reason to do that.  It’s a way to force us to combine with them, which is a very bad idea.

Dave Guldenschuh is going to Oklahoma City to try to help clear all this up.  When CoS started out, I didn’t think they’d get one state.  Dave was instrumental in passing CoS in his native Georgia, but has since become disillusioned with them, and is now on the Task Force.  Gary says he thinks things have been moving our way. It’s time to find out if he’s right.  We all have a lot of confidence in him, and in Dave G.  This will be a very big vote.  The Birchers are very strong in Oklahoma.  A win there would be a huge boost.

The Capitol rally in South Carolina is the day after to morrow, featuring potential Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, a very impressive man.  We’re hoping Senator Leatherman will see him.  We’ve asked Carson to invite Leatherman to the rally.  Carson’s black, which might mean something to Leatherman.  He’s got a lot of blacks in his district.  He may not run again.  He’s 85 and in failing health, falling to sleep occasionally on the floor.  But he may not have decided yet, and being seen in public with a black man of Carson’s stature, and appeal, might interest him.

The Clinton juggernaut is underway.  What a spectacle.  What a joke.  These people are absolutely amazing.  Hillary goes to the Dominican mansion of fashion magnate Oscar de la Renta in order to decide if she wants to run for President, on a platform of bashing the rich.  The week of her announcement she puts her extremely homely daughter on the cover of ultra sophisticated Elle magazine, decked out like a fashion queen.  In the interview inside, she talks of her new found dedication to the poor.  It’s hilarious.  Now she’s “cut her ties” to the Clinton Foundation, as if that meant something.

You don’t know where to begin with these people.  Where do you start?  I’m going with Paula Jones, but the other 90’s Clinton scandals, while legitimate, are stale.  The Clinton Foundation is fresh, and more importantly, it involves Bill.  Direct attacks on Hillary are dicey business, because she can always get weepy, that everyone’s being mean to her.  It’s worked for her before, and she’s probably been practicing her technique, knowing she’ll need to use it again.  Her gender is really the only rationale for her candidacy.  Clinton Foundation money is dirty money.  Even people on the left are aware of that.  That’s our first target  — Bill’s foundation, not hers.

I sincerely hope she meets her goal of raising $2.5 billion.  Suck the money out of these dumb bastards, I say.  It doesn’t matter.  The story of the Madison Avenue executives meeting to find out why their elaborate ad campaign was such a bust is a good one.  One of them asked, “Maybe it’s the God damn dog food?”  Hillary Clinton is bad dog food.  They won’t be able to sell her.

There’s a big lesson to be learned from all that Arab money going to the Clinton Foundation.  They’re trying to buy influence.  They didn’t need to do that as much in the past.  But today the American people are thoroughly fed up with the Middle East, and everyone in it, except the Israelis.  We’ll make sure Israel is O.K., but that doesn’t mean we need to get in the middle of all the insanity there.  We want out.  It’s cold hearted to say this, because there are a lot of innocent women and children in the Middle East.  But there are a lot of innocent women and children all over the world.  It is not the job of the American military to save them.  That’s up to their menfolk.

The fracking revolution made the Middle East unimportant to us.  It’s still important to the Europeans and Asians.  That’s why it’s their problem, not ours.  We’ve fought wars in the Middle East for oil.

Never again.

At the time of the Revolution, most Americans didn’t really want a central, or federal, government that had any power over them.  Virginians were happy to govern themselves, and so was everyone else.  They tried going without one for six years, but it just didn’t work.  The states began fighting among themselves, and there was no real way for them to resolve their differences.  New York, for instance, believed that the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont were squatting on its land.  The title they received from New Hampshire was invalid, but Ethan Allen would go to war to keep it.  Washington, especially, was very concerned.  He knew what it was like to try to field an army, and fight a war, without a central government, and a reliable source of money.  There was every reason to believe that the Revolutionary war would not be our last.  If we were to become a continental nation, we might very well have to go to war again with the British, or the Spanish.  How could we do that without a central government?

The Constitution was a collection of political compromises between the states, principally between big states and small.  To protect their rights the small states got the Senate, and equal representation there, regardless of population.  They also got Article V.  The Constitution would not have been ratified by the small states without it.  They were deeply mistrustful of a Congress where the House of Representatives, dominated by the populous states, would have so much power.  If the Constitution needed to be changed, the small states wanted a method which empowered them.  An Article V Convention would give them equal power with the large states, and assured them they could assert their rights on an equal footing.

So if an Article V Convention is called, 26 states, representing a minority of the population, can control it.  This strikes some as unfair somehow.  There has even been a suggestion that no amendment should be proposed that does not have a supermajority of states in the Convention supporting it.  I think that’s a bad idea.  It will make it harder to come to an agreement, and a good amendment might be watered down.  And it’s entirely unnecessary.  Nothing goes into the Constitution without the support of 38 states.  Delegates, in drafting their proposal, will always bear that in mind.

The meeting in Seattle is to begin the organization of the Convention.  We’ll need 26, and only 26.  I believe we can get 26.  When a legislative body organizes itself, creating a majority organization to control it, legislators don’t wait until they convene in the State Capitol.  They formally organize right after the election.  They informally organize even before the election, making certain assumptions about who will get elected.  That’s what we’re trying to do in Seattle, except around an agenda, not leadership.  Leadership can be decided down the road, once everyone has had a chance to get to know each other.  It probably isn’t that important.  It’s the agenda that counts.

Sports are meaningless, I know.  But I like to watch the final round of the Master’s golf tournament, and today it was especially gratifying.  Older people worry about the young, wonder if they’re going to be capable of keeping this country going.  21 year old Jordan Spieth won today, setting some records.  He seems like one of the finest young men I’ve seen in a long, long time.  A wonderful family, and loyal friends.  He may be another Tiger woods.

In golf.

He was a patriot, and while he would have made a terrible President, I admire him for that.  He flew B-29’s over Germany in the war.  For men of his age, their service in World War Two, or lack thereof, tells you most of what you need to know about them.  George McGovern loved this country.  Even today, a lot of people on the political left do as well.  Unfortunately, a lot of them really don’t.  All they want to talk about is slavery and the displacement of Native Americans.  Manifest Destiny was just American imperialism, and nothing more.  They read Howard Zinn and think they know something about American history.  They know nothing about it at all.

McGovern was a liberal idealist, and when the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Bobby Kennedy, wanted to take Johnson out in 1968 they turned to him.  He declined, mainly because his term was up in the Senate, and he wanted to run for reelection.  So Gene McCarthy did the job.  Somebody had to do it.  Johnson was a national disgrace.  No one thought McGovern had a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in 1972.  He was from South Dakota, for Christ’s sake.  He announced in January of 1971 and worked his ass off.  He was so angry about the Vietnam War that he was determined to win, and he did.  It was a remarkable piece of politics.

The Clintons are another Lyndon Johnson.  They’re just as corrupt and in love with power as he was, which is saying something.  A lot of young Americans died in Vietnam, needlessly, because it suited the political needs of this despicable man.  I guess he’s buried in Texas in a grave somewhere.  I’d like to pay it a visit.  Benghazi wasn’t Vietnam, and I don’t know all the details, but it certainly appears to me that Hillary would leave brave young Americans to die if it was politically necessary.

Could Lincoln Chafee be another George McGovern?  I would love to think so.  He’s diffident, not a real politician.  But neither was McGovern.  He always seemed to have a snarl on his face.  Now that I’m a Democrat, I can join his campaign.  I went on his website and signed up for email updates.  As soon as a California chapter is formed I’ll join.  I won’t spend much time on it.  Article V comes first.  But it will be fun.  I’m looking forward to it.

My father and his four brothers are all buried on the Frying Pan Ranch, on the White River, next to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  They all served in uniform in the war, which they were proud of.  Only one of them accomplished anything, especially not my father.  He’d always get pneumonia right before his tank battalion was supposed to go into action, so he never saw any.

Then there was Uncle Fritz, the family legend.  He ran off from home when he was twelve, after his mother died.  She died giving birth to his sister, my Aunt Rosemary, her ninth child.  She was Irish, a MacNamara, and a devout Catholic who did not believe in birth control.  Fritz was her favorite.  He was an original member of the 82nd Airborne Division, and fought all the way from Africa to Berlin.  During the war, he was a savage.

I went to Alaska to meet him, and when our eyes met there was instant recognition.  We looked very much alike, same build, same everything.  Except add about thirty pounds of muscle to the upper body.  He had a 53 inch chest.

I got to know him very, very well.

He was a junior at Yale when Pearl Harbor was attacked.  He joined the Marines, and fought from Guadalcanal to Okinawa.  Based on his later service in Korea, author James Brady said of him, “He was the only truly great man I’ve yet met in my life.”  When he got back from Korea he fathered a son, who he named Lincoln.  The Chafees come from a long and distinguished line of Rhode Island politicians, and both father and son served as Governor.  Now Lincoln has declared his candidacy for President as a Democrat.  He represents the only serious opposition Hillary will have for the nomination.

He’s smart.  He’s basing his opposition to her on her vote for the Iraq war.  That’s how Obama beat her, and it’s her greatest vulnerability among Democrats.  That vote could conceivably cost her the nomination again.  She voted for war because she thought it was the right thing to do, for her, politically.  She voted to send young Americans overseas to fight and die in a pointless war, because, for her, she figured it was smart politics.  Lincoln Chafee, and a lot of other Democrats, are well aware of this, and they will not sit idly by while this vile woman lies her way back to the White House.

I don’t know much about Lincoln Chafee, or Rhode Island, for that matter.  This postage stamp of a state was founded by Roger Williams, who fled the religious tyranny of Massachusetts because of his commitment to religious freedom.  It was the first colony to declare its independence, and the last to ratify the Constitution.  It was the only state which did not send a delegation to Philadelphia.  It joined the Union only after the Bill of Rights had been adopted.

I think Lincoln Chafee is another Howard Dean, with a little more discipline.  Despite his overbearing personality, Dean, the antiwar candidate, had a real shot at the Democratic nomination in 2004.  I think Chafee should be taken seriously.  The Clinton war room is hard at work, trying to dig up dirt on him, thinking of ways he can be attacked.  Chafee knows this, and doesn’t care.  He is his father’s son, a patriot.  I don’t discuss politics with my wife’s circle of friends, for obvious reasons.  But I’m going to tell them about Chafee.  He’s a liberal, like they are, but an honest, good man.  He’s a Jack Kennedy Democrat.

It’s because of people like Lincoln Chafee that I enjoy politics.  People I admire.  As long as this country produces people like the Chafees, we’ll be alright.

That would be Lew Uhler, granddaddy of this Article V movement.  Eighteen months ago when I decided to get involved I called a number for Lew I got off the internet.  He picked up, and we had a nice chat.  I went down to his office near Sacramento and met him and his son Kirk.  Lew drove me to lunch in his 1991 Buick.  He got me on the BBA Task Force, which I’ve been working with ever since.

Lew’s been in Mexico for ten days and said he had a way to stop illegal immigration.  Make all the illegal immigrants go through the hell he and his wife had to endure getting back into this country.  I told him all about the Seattle meeting.  We talked for half an hour and he’s putting it on his calendar.  He understood quite clearly the effect of Constitutional regulatory reform on the economy and the deficit.  He’s going to get a couple deep thinkers, one from Cato, one from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to make a presentation in Seattle on that precise topic.  It’s the kind of thing everyone knows, in a general sense. But when you really make the case, using hard numbers, of the positive economic impact of regulatory reform it’s overwhelming.

We talked about how, until the Civil War, the new land was always given to the people, and from North Dakota down to Texas, and everything East, it was.  That stopped, and the federal government kept a large share of the land of the West, from Montana down to New Mexico, and everything West.  Giving title of this land to the states, with the federal government retaining a beneficial interest, entitling it to 50% of the proceeds of development, would result in an enormous expansion of economic activity.

Speaking of deep thinkers, election analyst Nate Cohn had a big piece in the New York Times on how the Republican nomination contest was going to play out.  Nate has obviously been giving it a lot of thought, and makes a pretty good case for the conventional wisdom.  But he really shouldn’t take himself so seriously.  He’s basically a numbers cruncher, a numbers guy.  They have their uses but when they start telling you they know what’s going to happen, this far out, they’re blowing smoke.  In April of 1971 George McGovern had been running for President for four months, and was at 1% in the polls.  In January of 1972 he was at 3%.  People like Nate Cohn don’t understand that things happen, and people make them happen.

I think I know what’s going to happen.  We’re going to have the dirtiest campaign in modern history.  The Clintons and all their allies will stop at nothing to win.  Will we fight back?  I’m confident we will, and effectively, and beat them.  It’s a matter of political will.  One thing I’ve learned on the Task Force these last eighteen months is that there’s no shortage of that.  It’s really just a question of organizing it.  That’s what Seattle is all about.

I’ve always liked to fight, ever since I was a kid growing up in Richmond.  I got in a lot of fights.  It was a form of recreation.  We were just little kids, nine and ten years old, and we couldn’t really hurt each other.  We’d fight in the playground in the back of St. Cornelius at recess or at lunch.  The nuns knew what was going on, but they didn’t care.  Boys will be boys.  When we moved to Pleasant Hill, in the suburbs, I found out that kids didn’t fight as much as they did in Richmond, so I didn’t get in very many.   Anyway, I’ve always had a kind of combative attitude, and enjoy political fights like I used to enjoy real fights.  The one we’ve got coming up is going to be a doozy.

And I’m going to enjoy myself.