Miscellaneous

EQUIPMENT

Map of U. S.

50 U. S. Commemorative State Quarters, one per state

Playing pieces (tokens)

Score sheets  — lists of 50 states

One die

One egg timer

GOAL:  Be first player to get 38 states

PLAY

Each player places their token on a state, and checks that state off on their score sheet.  The first player rolls the die, and moves his token to adjoining states.  When you land on a state you check it off on your score sheet.  If a state is occupied by another player, you get to take one state away from that player and add it to your list.

Roll a one:  Move token to adjoining state.  Banker picks a quarter at random and gives it to you.  Check off the state on the quarter on your list.

Roll a two:  Move two states.  Roll twice.

Roll a three:  Move three states.  Take any state from any another player

Roll a four:  Move four states. Lose a state of your choice to a player of your choice.

Roll a five:  Move five states.  Pick any state to add to your score sheet.

Roll a six:  Move six states.  Give one of your quarters, if you have any, to another player of your choice.

When you reach 26 states you turn the egg timer, and, at the end of your turn, try to cut deals on exchanging with other players.  When the sand runs out, trading time is over.

When you reach 34 states you no longer can have any state taken away from you, in any way.

I don’t think the R’s lose the Senate next year, despite having the big bumper crop of 2010 defending their seats.  They could pick up seats, not lose them.

Nevada  — Should be an easy pickup.  If Gov. Brian Sandoval runs, the D’s will probably fold.  They can’t beat him.  If Sandoval passes it should be Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson.  Now that Sonora Pass is open I can drive over it to Carson City in three hours.  Week after next I’ll try to get an appointment with Roberson.  I’ll introduce him to the Reagan Initiative.  The feds own 83% of Nevada, and Nevadans aren’t happy about that.  I’ll try to convince Roberson to incorporate the Reagan Initiative into his campaign.  To me it’s a no-brainer.  We’ll see what Roberson thinks.

Colorado  —  Democrat Michael Bennet beat Republican Ken Buck in 2010, but not by much.  Buck wasn’t a very good candidate.  Colorado adjourns in a couple weeks and I’ll call Kevin Lundberg and find out who they’ve got.  Kevin ran for Congress a while back, so he’s got to be plugged in.  Hell, he might want to run himself.  36% of Colorado is owned by the feds.  Do Coloradans want that land for themselves?   I bet they do.

Oregon  — Ron Wyden is fairly reasonable, for a Democrat.  But he voted for Obamacare, which has been a colossal brain fart in Oregon.  Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli looks like the logical guy to me.  I’ve had a few good conversations with one of his main staffers, Steve Elzinga.  The feds own 53% of Oregon.  Ferrioli is from rural, southeastern Oregon, the kind of place where the Reagan Initiative is going to be very popular.  What I’ve learned about Ferrioli is all positive.  If he won’t run he’ll know who will.

Washington  –I’ve always thought Patty Murray wasn’t very bright.  I know it’s looksism, but she even looks dumb.  Senate President Pam Roach is my kind of person, and woman.  She told me that she believes Washington voters are a lot more conservative than people think.  The feds own 28% of Washington.  That’s about two million acres.  That’s a lot of land.  Why shouldn’t the people of Washington own it?

California  —  I’ve written about it before.  If Devin Nunes or David Valadao run, they can win.  The Reagan Initiative will help a whole lot.  45% of California is owned by the feds.  That’s an area the size of Oklahoma.  Why do the feds own it?  Are the environmentalists worried that they will ruin it?   They’ve owned California, up ’til now.  What are they afraid of?

Arizona  — Time for McCain to go.  I want Andy Biggs to run against him.  Our sponsor, Bob Thorpe, is somewhat close to him.   I’ll call Bob and see if he’ll talk to Andy about it.  The feds own  46% of Arizona.  Andy Biggs can run on a platform of bringing ownership of a lot of that land home to Arizona.

Alaska  —  Fourteen years of futility are enough.  It’s time for Lisa Murkowski to leave.  I think David Cuddy is the guy.  I want to be heavily involved in his campaign.  I want David to take credit for the Reagan Initiative in Alaska.  I want him to form an organization, Alaskans for the Reagan Initiative, or something.  Get out front on this.  If we pull it off it will be the biggest thing since the pipeline.  I think he could win big.

It’s kind of funny to think about Andy Biggs doing a 180 on Article V, but it makes a lot of sense.  I’d love to pitch it to him.  With it, he can take down McCain.  Right now a lot of Arizona conservatives, from all over the state, are pissed off at Andy, and his fantasies about Article V.

I think Andy and I are going to get along just fine.  Maybe we’ll be buddies.  He’s an extremely talented outdoor photographer.  And a hard right conservative.  Actually, he looks a little bit like a pansy to me.  Not really my kind of guy.  Not very many people in politics are.

I took my wife and her friend to see “Woman in Gold’.  A truly great movie.  Maria Altmann was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, one of the survivors of the wealthy Bloch-Bauer family.  Her Aunt Adele was the subject of Gustav Klimt’s famous portrait, one of the great works of art of the 20th century.  The Nazis stole it from her family and the Austrian government refused to give it up.  It is considered the Mona Lisa of Austria.  With the help of the grandson of one of the 20th century’s most famous composers, a young American lawyer, she got the picture of her aunt and sold it to the Lauder Museum in New York for $125 million.  You can see it there today, thanks to her, and Lauder.  Amazingly, the movie was understated politically, and was actually understanding of the Austrians.

It portrayed wealthy Jewish society in prewar Vienna.  Very sympathetically.  They were beautiful people.  It reminded me of what got me interested in politics.  I think I was eight.  I saw film from Germany showing Jews as they were being rounded up, destined for the death camps.  One boy, my age, looked a lot like me. I tried to figure this out.  Why was he being killed?  If he could be sent to his death for no reason, could the same thing happen to me?  Who were these Nazis?  This was 1953, or so, and I found out the Nazis had been defeated.  But it made me feel vulnerable.  As I aged, and learned things, I tried to figure out how the Nazis came to power, and how that could be prevented from happening in my country.  The danger, I began to understand, was from totalitarianism in general, not just its Nazi variety.  For most of my life in politics the danger was communism.  I got into politics because I was a fervent anticommunist.  That’s why this is called the Reagan Project.  Reagan defeated communism.  And he did it peacefully.

As our forefathers understood, if we lose our freedom it will not be from a foreign power.  Our oceans protect us from that.  We’ll lose it slowly, from a thousand cuts.  So my politics has evolved.  We don’t really have to worry about Nazis or communists.  And we don’t need to fear radical Islam.  It’s no threat to us.  We have to rally to the Constitution, the real guarantee of our freedom as Americans.

I’d love to make a movie, but I’ll settle for a half hour documentary.  It will feature 30 or 40 legislative leaders, from a minimum of 26 states, talking about their participation in the Amendment Convention of 2016.  What they will do, and what they won’t do, and won’t allow done.  There will be a narrator  — me, if we can’t think of anyone better  — talking about the place of Article V in our Constitutional system of checks and balances and separation of powers.  David Cuddy got himself in the movie business a few years ago, so I’ll ask him to help.  We’ll want a pro doing the filming, someone who understands lighting and editing.

West Virginia sponsor John Overington told us today that Speaker Armstead let our bill die, in part, because of his fear of a runaway.  It was not, as I thought, fear of losing federal funds.  This video will be designed for him, and others like him.  If it’s properly done it could be very persuasive.

Movies are the only art form that is improving.  Literature has been going downhill since Shakespeare, music since Beethoven, painting since Rembrandt, and sculpture since Michaelangelo.  Moviemaking gets better.  It’s what’s happening now.  If you’ve got a story to tell, make a movie.

We’ll have a little family movie made in an hour or so, when the mother of our grandchildren remarries.  They’re eleven and eight, and will be dressed to the nines.  The groom is a great guy who will be a great stepfather.  A special day for these little girls.

One of many more to come.

Ted Stevens was not much of a politician.  He tried running for the Senate in ’68, and couldn’t even get nominated.  He was a humorless asshole, which generally doesn’t translate into political success.  But a vacancy occurred, he got appointed, and took full advantage of his incumbency.  He was thoroughly corrupt.  In every way.

His personal secretary had been very active in Republican Party politics for years, and when we took over District Nine in ’76, for Reagan, she wanted to be a delegate to the State Convention.  Stevens was leading Ford’s campaign, so there was no way I was going to give her a vote.  I made her fifth alternate, and she was really pissed off.  I’m sure Ted heard all about it.  I’d been in the state two years, and I made a life long enemy of a very powerful politician.

Ted Stevens and I were polar opposites.  He was a small and insecure man, and a real lawyer.  That’s not a compliment.  He liked playing the tough guy, though.  He used to wear an Incredible Hulk tie to show what a bad ass he was.  When I met him we took an instant dislike of each other.  He was used to people kissing his ring, and he didn’t like my attitude.

I wanted to take Ted Stevens out, but I could never find a way.  Nobody really liked him, he was a jerk.  But he was a money machine for the State of Alaska.  He brought billions a year back to a state that was quite poor, before Prudhoe.  Politically, it made him bullet proof.

He justified his corruption because he thought of himself as a Great White Father to Alaska’s Natives. He probably actually did care for the Natives, I guess I’ll give him that.  He tried to give them anything they wanted.  What they wanted, more than anything, practically, was a special preference for hunting and fishing rights.  They called it subsistence, and it was a huge political issue.  A whole lot of non-Natives in Alaska like to hunt and fish.  It’s the reason a lot of them live there.  And they didn’t want to be second class citizens, which is exactly what the Natives wanted them to be.  Stevens got the state legislature to pass a subsistence law, but the Alaska Supreme Court threw it out.  It was clearly discriminatory.  So Stevens wanted to pass a constitutional amendment granting special preferential rights to Alaska Natives.  It didn’t get anywhere at first, but he wouldn’t give up.  He kept trying, getting the oil industry behind him, and everybody else he could muscle.  Finally, after several years, he managed to get a 2/3 vote in the State Senate, and it came to the House, where I was Minority Leader.

I was amazed at some of the Senators he’d bullied into voting for it.  One guy, in particular, Tim Kelly from Eagle River.  It was the end of elective office for Tim, and he knew it.  That vote cost him his career in politics, but he was now a ward of Ted Stevens, and would be taken care of.  Stevens had enough power to do that.

I had 16 of 40 votes in the House.  They needed to get three of my people.  We beat them in regular session, so Governor Cowper, a Democrat, called us back to Juneau in midsummer.  Very inconvenient for everyone, but that was the point.  I was vacationing in Santa Barbara with my family, and had to fly to Juneau from California.  We were solid.  We held out, all 16 of us.  It was all a waste of time.  After the vote Speaker Sam Cotten called me up to the podium, and told me the Governor wanted to talk to me.  I asked Sam, “Why would I want to talk to him?”, and it was all over.  We left Juneau the next day.

Stevens finally got taken out by some overzealous and unscrupulous attorneys in the Justice Department.  A lot of people are under the impression that Stevens wasn’t corrupt after all.  Wrong.  Dead wrong.

After his conviction he lost his Senate seat to Mark Begich, a small time Democrat.  Embarrassing.  And appropriate.  I never saw him after that loss.  I really didn’t like this guy. I kind of wish I’d seen him one more time.  I’d have given him a real big smile.

Lisa Murkowski is Ted’s political heir, and the titular head of what’s left of his political machine.  Alaska should be embarrassed by having an airhead like her representing it in the Senate.  David Cuddy ran against Stevens back in ’96.  He was going to announce his candidacy on my radio talk show.  Stevens found out about it and threatened the station owner with the loss of his broadcast license.  A couple years later he asked the publisher of the Anchorage Daily News to stop running my biweekly opinion column.  Stevens had no answers to my criticism, so he tried to shut me up.

I feel as though I have an unpaid debt in Alaska.  It’ll be fun to go back, and try to get some payback.

Biddulph has been trying to organize a meeting for May 16th, right after the ALEC executive board meeting in Savannah.  He tells me this morning that he’s succeeded in getting Ohio Senate President Keith Faber to moderate, along with me, a session on what can go into a BBA.  Faber’s important.  He’s part of Kasich’s inner circle, and a very bright guy.  And a guy that wants, very badly, to save the coal industry.  He’ll be one of the leaders of the Amendment Convention.  He has shown that he will do all he can to help us in the states we still need.

Ever since I came up with the Reagan Initiative I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me why it can’t, or won’t, work.  Nothing yet.  If Faber can’t come up with some objection, maybe there isn’t one.

Dave is also working, with Mike Bowman of ALEC, at getting an oil and gas guy at the Thursday meeting.  They’ve got a private room set up, which is good.  I’d rather not have people siting at a bar overhear our conversation.

I have an idea.  I think Peabody should see if it can find a whistleblower inside the EPA.  I think there’s an active, ongoing conspiracy between the EPA and the major environmental organizations, in cahoots with the White House.  The mission: kill the coal industry.  They’re fanatics, and given to fanatical language.  One of them got caught with an open mike last year and was forced to resign.  Maybe some sane person was hired during the Bush administration, and they’re still there.  I bet they’d have stories to tell.

You never know what you’re going to find unless you look.