Month: May 2015

He’s President of the Indiana Senate and has been a leader in the Article V BBA movement.  Biddulph had a good discussion today with him and with Ohio Senate President Keith Faber.  Long and Faber are apparently buddies.  This is good.  If Faber is to Co-Chair the Seattle Summit, the only person who might legitimately feel passed over will be Long.  You can make the case that he “deserves” it as much as Faber does.

Biddulph has also set up a Friday lunch with Faber, and is setting up a dinner for a dozen or so legislative leaders Friday evening.  Thank you, David Biddulph.  When I get to know Faber a little bit I’ll propose that he Co-Chair the Summit.  David thinks he’ll agree.  The other Co-Chair should be a woman, preferably a Democrat from the West.  So what does Long get?

When the actual organization of the Convention takes place there will be a number of slots open.  Maybe Long should be the Floor, or Majority, Leader.  I think there will be three plum committees which people are going to want to chair.  One on the traditional BBA, one on land transfers to the states, and one on regulatory reform.  Maybe Long has a special interest in one of them.  There will be other committees as well, of course.  Credentials, Rules, and Style.  The Style Committee will be in charge of drafting the final version of the Amendment, melding the work of the three substantive committees.

Maybe Long will be content to be one of the core group that Faber will rely on at the Convention.  I’m speculating here, but to get to 26 we may need to offer some of these choice assignments to different legislative leaders from around the country.  We really want the active involvement of incoming NCSL President Curt Bramble.  Maybe Curt would like to be Floor Leader.  With the Reagan Initiative I’m confident we’ll get Wyoming.  But if Wyoming Senate President Phil Nicholas knew he was going to chair the committee on land transfers, we could be sure of Wyoming.  Maybe West Virginia Speaker Armstead wants to chair Regulatory Reform.  Why not?  We’ve got to get West Virginia, or else.

I wonder how much people like Faber and Long have actually thought about how the Convention would actually work.  I’ll find out in Savannah.

Saw my old friend Bill Choquette today.  I met Bill when we were studying for the bar in the summer of ’74.  Bill taught me about fishing and hunting moose, and we became big buddies.  His father and his three brothers, all Alaska bad asses, made me an honorary Choquette.  The four brothers and I met at Swiftwater Bill’s one night, and brother Dave snuck in a bottle so he would have to buy only one drink.  He pulls his bottle out to refresh his drink, and I say, “Dave, you don’t have to do that.  I own this place, and drinks are on me.”  I always had fun with the Choquettes.

I promised Bill I’d be back with my sons and granddaughter in three years.  It’s a promise I intend to keep.

The prize will be $10,000, or $50,000, or whatever we can raise.  All women are eligible.  You enter by posting a video of yourself on You Tube, saying something like:

“I’m Paula Jones.  When I was 25 I was working as a receptionist at a hotel in Little Rock.  Governor Bill Clinton stopped by and we had a few words.  He seemed nice enough.  Later an Arkansas State Trooper came by and told me the Governor wanted to see me.  He escorted me to his room, and dropped me off there.  When we were alone the governor pulled down his pants, exposed himself, and asked me for sex.  I was horrified, fled the hotel, but told only family and friends about what happened.  It was not a good idea for a poor single woman Arkansas to challenge a man like Bill Clinton.

“A few years later I read an article in the American Spectator that seemed to say that I had some sort of relationship with Bill Clinton.  I was very angry and decided to file a lawsuit.  I finally got a small time Arkansas lawyer to file the papers just before the statute of limitations ran out.

“When Clinton was put under oath he repeatedly lied.  Not only about me, but about other women, including Monica Lewinsky.  He was barred from practicing law because of this perjury.  I finally accepted a cash settlement of $650,000, most of which went to my lawyers.

“I’m coming forward now because his wife, Hillary, wants to be President.  Throughout her married life she has enabled the sexual predator she married.  Women who have had the courage to come forward have been called bimbos, trailer trash, and worse.  All these women did was come forward with the truth.  I didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did they.

“Bill Clinton likes to say Hillary was his co-President.  If she’s elected he’ll be her co-President.  That would be a national disgrace.  Again.”

Contestants don’t have to say these exact words.  This is just a sample of what could be said.  As long as the entry is squarely based on the factual record, it will qualify.

We’ll award the prize the day Hillary formally announces.

That was his name.  Not Vince, Vince Wulf,  From Anvik, far in the interior of Alaska.  He’s in Anchorage for some sort of environmental conference, he wasn’t sure.  I was in front of the Sheraton having a smoke and he bummed one off me.  He said I looked Irish, and I said I was.  He said he was part German, from his great grandfather, who left Germany in the 30’s, for political reasons.  This man came to Anvik, in the absolute middle of nowhere of Alaska, married a native woman, and together they raised five children.  Vince Wulf is one of his descendants, and is proud of it, as he should be.

It’s good to be back in Alaska.

After I passed the bar in 1974 I couldn’t get a job, so I started a law practice in the basement of our dumpy little house in Spenard.  My wife used some of her inheritance for the down payment.  She was seven months pregnant when we moved in.  Things were a little bleak.  I really didn’t know anybody, and had no idea of how to practice law.  They don’t teach you that at UCLA.  They’re more into theory.  It got so bad we thought of hopping in the car and driving down the Alcan, back to California.  I found out you could make $20 an hour as an ad hoc public defender for federal criminal defendants, so I signed up and was assigned some cases.  Most lawyers didn’t like to work that cheap.  I ate it up.  The prosecutor in some of these cases was assistant U. S. Attorney Sam Pestinger, a guy my age from Kansas.  He decided he wanted to quit the U.S. Attorney’s office and become my law partner, so we formed Pettyjohn and Pestinger the summer of 1975.  I started making some money, and we were on our way.

Part of becoming Sam’s partner was going boating with him in Prince William Sound.  He had a twenty foot inboard, with a small cabin, and in the fall he wanted to go bear hunting.   So we went up to Coghill Bay, in College Fjord, and sure enough saw a black bear.  Sam handed me his .270 and told me to shoot it.  His vision wasn’t very good, he said.  So I shot it in the shoulder, knocking it down, but it got up and ran off into the woods. We had to follow it to try to finish it off.  You can’t leave a wounded bear.  It’s irresponsible. So we followed its trail of blood up into the hills, but couldn’t find it.

That was the first, and last, wild animal I’ve ever killed, except for a caribou and a moose, which I killed for meat.  I don’t understand trophy hunters. Why do they take such pleasure in killing beautiful animals?  I loved Alaska, above all, for its natural beauty.  Alaskans are outdoorsmen, and love their beautiful environment.  They love it more than other Americans, because they live there.  The same can be said of the people of Nevada or Wyoming or Utah.  These people can be entrusted with their own land, despite what the environmental extremists will tell you.  The Federal Lands Commission is a net positive for the environment.  The legislature of Idaho, and the people of Idaho, are and will be better stewards of their land than some pencil pusher in Washington.

A few years ago some national magazine sent a reporter to the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, the Serengeti of the North, to describe its natural wonders to its readers.  He spent four or five days there, and the only sign of life he found was a tuft of caribou hair.  He wrote lovingly of that tuft of fur, and all the wonderful animals it surely must represent.  These creatures must be protected form those greedy Alaskans who want to destroy their ecosystem.

That’s what we’re up against.  Crazy people.  If we give the oil companies a few acres to drill on, they can produce enough wealth from ANWR to fund all kinds of true wildlife conservation.  And help balance the federal and state budgets.  And put thousands to work at good paying jobs.  And help free us from reliance on oil from the Middle East.

There is tremendous wealth on and under western federal lands.  The environmentalists in the federal government don’t want that wealth produced.  These are people you would hesitate to entrust with a leaf blower.  You’d never want to allow them access to a weed whacker.  They’d hurt themselves.  The warning labels you see on a step ladder, the ones telling you not to fall off, are designed for them.  But they know best.  They’re really smart people.  They have degrees.

So I’m off to Anchorage in the morning.  It will be good to go home.

Two years from now the people of this country will be ready for campaign finance reform through Article V.  They will have just endured the most expensive, and one of the dirtiest, Presidential campaigns in our history.  Bill and Hillary will raise and spend billions of dollars, and they will smear anyone who gets in their way.  It’s the Clinton Way.  It will be very ugly.

Because she’s such a lousy candidate, Hillary has no choice.  She’ll never get people to like her.  So she will try to make people like the Republican even less than they like her.  The lies and slander will come thick and fast.  In its death throes, legacy media will aid and abet.  This is going to be really hard to watch.

We have to be prepared to fight fire with fire.  No Marquis of Queensbury rules.  My personal favorites, Paul and Kasich, will be up to the task.  They’ve got balls.  Jeb Bush does not have balls.  It’s one of a multitude of reasons he’s the wrong guy.

A couple months ago I told Ryan Clayton of Wolf-pac I supported his campaign.  It’s mainly because, even though he’s a man of the left, he’s using Article V.  We are not a leftist country, so if there’s an Article V Campaign Finance Reform Convention it will not propose a leftist Amendment.  No one knows, today, what it would come up with, if anything.  So give it a go and see what the proposal is.  If it’s ratified by 38 states it will represent a national consensus, and we’ll all have to live with it, even if we don’t care much for it.

Kasich was on Fox News Sunday again, looking more like a candidate than ever.  He seems to be enjoying himself.  He’s got the passion, and let’s it show.  He’s good.  Paul has passion as well, I’m sure, but he’s a button down guy, and I’ve never seen him show any real fire.  Both have balls, and both are reaching across the aisle to Democrats of good will.  Outside of Washington there are a lot of such people, and to do big things we need some of them to buy in.  And we need to do big things.

I’ll be meeting Ohio Senate President Keith Faber on the 16th.  If he’s the man I think he is I’ll ask him to Co-Chair the Seattle Summit.  When it convenes, at, say, 10:00 a.m. on Monday August 3rd, he would have the floor, and hold the gavel.  It would be his meeting to conduct.  Somebody has to do it, and there’s no one more suited than him, as far as I can tell.  This does not mean that he will be in the Chair when the actual Amendment Convention meets a year from now.  But it would give him a leg up.

He can only be Co-Chair, of course, if he buys into the Reagan Initiative.  I bet he does.   His biggest contributor is American Electric Power, one of the largest coal burning utilities in the country.  Regulatory reform will be a boon to them, and Ohio.  But then again he might not buy in.  He’s part of Kasich’s inner circle, and Kasich has shown no interest.

Dr. Ben Carson announced today, and according to Bill Fruth said something about the need to get revenue from federal lands, which he estimated at $50 trillion.  That may be a bit high, but he gets it.  If we can’t get Kasich or Paul to the Seatlle Summit I’ll bet we could get Carson.  He’s a very attractive and intelligent man.  I like him a lot, and so do a whole lot of people.  I think he should be the Republican Vice Presidential candidate.  He’s more qualified than Sarah Palin was.  If something awful happened and he became President the sun wouldn’t fall out of the sky.  Hell, we’ve endured eight years of Obama, how much worse could it get?