Miscellaneous

Politics and the movies have a lot in common.  In Hollywood, as in politics, nobody really knows anything.  But a lot of people make a living pretending they actually know things.  It’s all bullshit.  Nobody knows anything.  Which means my opinion is just as good as the next guy’s.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen next year.  There will be ten Republican candidates at the first debate in August, and going into Phase One.

Phase One goes on for the first three weeks in February, and features Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada  — a total of 133 delegates.  This will whittle down the field, but we don’t know, for sure, who gets whittled.

Phase Two is the first two weeks of March, including Super Tuesday, March 1st.  Eighteen states plus Puerto Rico, 940 delegates.  (These numbers and dates are approximate.  States are still adjusting their schedules).  March 1st features the Texas (155 delegates) showdown between Cruz and Perry.  Only one will walk away from it.  The other will be a casualty.  Florida just announced that its 99 delegate primary on March 15th will be winner take all.  That means either Bush or Rubio win it, and the loser goes home.

After March 15th a lot of campaigns should fold, including (if they’re even running) Jindal, Fiorina, Carson, Christie, Graham, either Bush or Rubio, and either Perry or Cruz.  Unless his campaign has turned into a debacle, Kasich should still be standing.  Almost all of these states will have delegates awarded in some proportionate manner, meaning he should have won something besides Ohio (March 8th, 66 delegates.)   He should get some traction in Illinois (69) and Michigan (59), as well as a number of other states.

Phase Three lasts almost three months, from mid-March to June 7th.  It has 28 states and some territories, 1400 delegates.  On June 7th it winds down with California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota, 303 delegates.  There really should be, at the absolute maximum, no more than six campaigns left: Cruz/Perry, Bush/Rubio, Huckabee/Santorum, Walker, Paul, and Kasich.  If it hasn’t been decided already, that is.  In 2012 Romney sealed the deal in April.  It was over.  But he was up against a very weak field.  Gingrich?  Santorum?  Give me a break.

If more than one candidate is still standing it could come down to California, as it did in 1964.  172 delegates, divvied up mainly by the vote in Congressional districts.  Kasich could do well here.  He could win it here.

Especially if he’s the guy a lot of the “establishment” has fallen back to.  I really don’t think either Bush or Christie make it to Phase Three.   I think Kasich is a better candidate than Walker, and that will have been demonstrated in February and March.

I don’t pretend to know any of this, it’s just speculation.  But it’s just as plausible as any other scenario.  You can’t dismiss it out of hand.  You should be prepared for it.  Just as you should be prepared for a lot of other scenarios.

I’ve been involved, to some extent, in campaigns since ’64, and Goldwater.  This is the most fun I’ve had in my life.

Obama’s right when he says they’re no real threat to us.  And while his policy is incoherent, I’ll say this for him.  His heart is in the right place: no war.  His troop surge in Afghanistan was halfhearted.  He should have just withdrawn, and left these people to themselves.  But we’re in the process of leaving, at last.  He was foolish to draw a red line in Syria.  He’s a terrible bluffer, doesn’t know how.  He just doesn’t know how to play poker, period.  It’s embarrassing.  And he really doesn’t like Israel.  To him it’s just another white colonial outpost in the third world.  Kind of like Zimbabwe.  Israel is much more than that.  Judaism is the father of Christianity, and we are a western Christian nation.  We’re simply not going to allow another holocaust.

But if Israel wants to fight a preemptive war they’re on their own.  We don’t do preemptive wars.  They’re un-American.  We fight defensive wars.  World War One was started as a preemptive war.  Once one country began to mobilize, they all had to, in order to keep up.  The Germans, especially, had absolutely nothing to gain, but blundered into war because they thought they had no choice.  Stupidity in high places  leads to tragedy.

It looks as though Iran may get the bomb, and that’s a huge problem for Israel.  But not for us.  We can’t go around the world getting into wars to stop people from getting the bomb.  Back in the 60’s William F. Buckley advocated bombing Red China to prevent it from getting the bomb.  He was crazy.  His rabid anticommunism clouded his judgment.  We don’t do wars of choice, only of dire necessity.

Absolutely the worst case scenario is a nuclear 9-11.  It’s impossible to say that it can never happen.  It could.  We could wake up some sunny morning to see Manhattan in smoldering ruins.  It’s a remote possibility, but it’s real.  So do we engage in perpetual warfare in the Middle East to lessen this possibility?  Might such warfare actually increase it?  How do we know?  Which side do we err on, caution or war?

I vote for caution.  We’re allied with Israel and will defend it.  But we should not wage war on its behalf.  There’s a difference.  You could make a case, geopolitically, for kicking Iraq out of Kuwait.  It was a war for oil.  But with fracking we don’t need that oil anymore.  Our European and Asian allies need that oil.  If blood needs to be shed to secure it, so be it.  Just not American blood.

The West and Islam are two different worlds.  I experienced that when my caravan of Mercedes’ crossed from Bulgaria into Turkey.  It was almost a physical sensation.  This was 1967, and Bulgaria was as backward as Turkey.  Istanbul was more of a modern city than Sofia was, but it was different, strange.

I met some English guys at the Hofbrauhaus in Muncih, and they invited me to go with them to Tehran.  They’d hooked up with some Iranian car smugglers.  The Iranians  wanted guys with western passports to put on the title of the cars they were smuggling back into Iran.  You drove from Munich to Tehran in a caravan, and they’d give you $100 and a bus ticket back to Istanbul or on to Kabul.  I was very short on money, and signed on with them, and off we went.  It was a trip.

Iran was Islamic, like Turkey, but I felt much more comfortable in Tehran than I did in Istanbul.   I even made friends with an Iranian guy I ran into. He spoke good English and he showed me around.  The Shah was still in power, and he was trying to westernize his country.  My friend explained to me that Islam was not the traditional religion of Iran.  That was Zoroastrianism, which he described to me.  It was kind of a laid back paganism.  We even went out one night for a couple beers.  They were playing a popular song by an Iranian singer, a woman.  It was kind of a love ballad, I guess.  Haunting, exotic.  There was even a beautiful Iranian girl there, and we were looking at each other.  My friend said that was very unusual.  Iranian girls weren’t loose, to say the least.

So do we bomb Iran, on behalf of the Israelis, and drive them further back into the stone age?  No, we don’t do that.

We don’t do that.

Thanks to the continuing generosity of Dave and Suzie Biddulph we’ll have a room in which the San Diego Article V Summit can take place.  So it’s going to happen.  Everything else is gravy.  Faber and Long’s invitation letter, along with the invites I and others will be issuing, will get enough attendees to make it a success.  A slam dunk would be 26 states represented by their Speaker, Senate President, or both.  31 would be better, 34 better still.  We’ll need to raise the money for scholarships to get that kind of a turn out.  And a draw.  Lew Uhler is going to try to get Rep. Goodlatte of Virginia, Chairman of House Judiciary to come.  His committee will aggregate the Resolutions, and recommend a time and place for the Convention.  I hope he’s attracted to the idea of doing it in Richmond.  We need all the help we can get next year in the Virginia legislature.

On today’s Loren Enns mentioned that a Maryland State Senator has been quoted to the effect that they will rescind their Resolution if we get close to 34.  No surprise there.  If that were, in fact, to happen we’ll need Virginia.  As I’ve mentioned before, I think there needs to be a follow up to San Diego.  I like doing it at the Capitol in Annapolis.  Maybe this state senator can help us with the arrangements.

Lew Uhler talked with former Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli, who says there are five competitive state senate races in Virginia this November, the outcome of which will determine if we have a shot there next year.  Everyone will have to do all we can to help.  Those races may decide if we get 34 next year.

Our man in South Carolina, John Steinberger, sees a lot of Presidential candidates.  He asks them about an Article V BBA, and the latest to sign on are Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson.  To the best of my knowledge, only Bush, Christie, Walker and Huckabee haven’t come over.  I’m hoping Kasich calls them out on it at the Cleveland debate.  They’re not crazy, so they’ll say yes.  Then we can go in to 2016 saying every single Republican Presidential candidate wants an Article V BBA.  We’ll ask them to sign a letter, urging the state legislatures of our target states to pass our Resolution.  Who’s not going to sign that letter, and why?  This may be a good tool next year.

If you’re going to run for President, it helps to be smart.  If you’re not that smart, you’re at a disadvantage.  Not fatal, necessarily, but a distinct hindrance to the Cause.  Walker’s not that smart.  Our man in Wisconsin, Chris Kapenga, the Legislative Kid, hit Walker up on an Article V BBA two and a half years ago.  He passed.  For whatever reason, he passed.  He wasn’t bright enough to figure it out.  He’s either a little dense, or he didn’t think it through.   Maybe a little bit of both.

I think that’s going to cost him.

There are two very popular Conservative Republican Congressmen from the heart of California’s Central Valley that people should pay attention to.  Devin Nunes and David Valadao are Portuguese-American dairy farmers whose families came from the Azores.  Valadao’s district is 71% Hispanic, Nunes’ is 45%.  Nunes is a twelve year veteran who has a realistic shot at the open Senate seat.  His competition would be the hyper-liberal Kamala Harris, the black AG from San Francisco, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Orange County, a seriously erratic woman.

“McFarland U.S.A.”  is a Kevin Costner movie about a town in Valadao’s district that is 90% Mexican-American.  The boys cross country team won some state championships, and it’s a very inspiring story.  Except that today McFaraland, like most other agricultural towns in the Valley, is dying economically.  The drought is killing them.

10% of California’s water use is urban, 40% agriculture.  Half goes for habitat, or maintenance of the ecosystem.  Maintenance of the delta smelt’s ecosystem takes 1.2 million acre feet of water a year.  This bait fish, which only evolved into a separate subspecies 8-10,000 years ago, is more important than the good people of McFarland.

99% of all species which have existed on this planet are extinct.  Species are born.  Species die.  It’s called evolution.  But the environmentalists who run California don’t believe evolution should be allowed to work.  When it comes to saving the delta smelt, money, and water, are no object.  But there are other, more intelligent ways to save this species.  It’s thriving in some reservoirs, for instance, growing much larger than its normal size.

Nunes and Valadao have legislation to address this problem.  It deserves support from all the Republican Presidential candidates.  The first one to go into their districts, and hold an event with one or both of them, would get some serious media attention in California.  Positive attention.  Enough to get a bump in the polls in the most populous state.

Each Congressional district in California gets three delegates to Cleveland, selected by the Republican voters of that district.  So there’s that, as well.

There’s a story in Washington state that’s almost as good as the delta smelt.  There are stories all over the West.

They just need to be told.