Miscellaneous

I did a back of the envelope calculation on the 2016 Electoral College.  I figure we get 409 votes next year.

April Fools!

That’s what it’s going to be all about.  It makes the world go round.  It won the second world war.  In some ways, it was what the war was all about.  The Japanese went to war for oil.  German military strategy was all about oil.  If you want to understand the importance of oil, read Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize”.  It will open up your eyes.

And, whether we like it or not (and I don’t), the fight over the Reagan Project will be about oil.  Leading the fight against us will be the Center for American Progress, led by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.  There are subsidiaries, like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Western Priorities.  But the CAP is the lead dog.  Soros, of course, is the main money man.  But it gets money from Fortune 500 companies as well, along with Gates money.  And, tellingly, almost a million dollars from the United Arab Emirates.  I wonder why?

They stopped us in Montana.  We had enough Democrats to pass the bill in the House, despite their efforts.  But then these guys got to Gov. Bullock, and he killed it.

They’ve got the money but we’ve got the issue.  Last week Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R. AK) put in a budget amendment calling for the disposal of excess federal lands.  It passed 51-49 on a party line vote, with only three Republicans opposed.  It’s in a non binding budget resolution, and has no chance of becoming law with Obama as President, but it shows there is political support for something like the Federal Lands Commission.

We’ve also got Clive Bundy on our side.  What a character.  He ranches on federal land in Nevada and refuses to recognize federal authority.  He and his buddies got in armed standoff with the federales not long ago, which they won, and he was in Carson City last week to testify on a bill.  The Center for Western Priorities keeps track of these things, and says there are about 65 of these bills introduced in various legislatures.  Speaker Mike Chenault has got one going up in Alaska.

All these bills are about trying to do what the Reagan Amendment does.  But they’re unconstitutional.  Everybody knows that.  These state legislators, all across the country, are trying to do something to get their land.  They just don’t know how to do it, so they get frustrated and try to pass these meaningless bills.

At some point CAP is going to try and get the Maryland legislature to rescind their BBA Resolution.  It’s just a matter of time.  I’m kind of surprised they didn’t do it this year.  Maryland adjourns in less than two weeks, I’m pretty sure, and they’ve run out of time this year.  When we get close to 34 they’ll make their move.

I’ve never counted on Maryland, not from the get go.  If we lose it next year we’ll need to get Virginia or Montana to make up for it.  We need to get the conservative Republican Governor in Maryland, Larry Hogan, to raise hell when they make their move.  Make a big public stink about it.  That’s about all he could do.  He’s got no say.  The Maryland legislature will be under a lot of pressure from the national Democratic Party to do CAP’s bidding.  That’s a very difficult fight for us to win, but we’ll try.  If the BBA, and the Reagan Amendment, have captured the public’s attention we’d at least have a chance.

So this is the fight.  The Reagan Project vs. the Center for American Progress.  George Soros against the sons of the Gipper.  We’ll see who wins.  He’s a very smart and a very rich man.  But he’s not an American, and he doesn’t understand this country.  He’s playing politics, and he’s an amateur.  He’s also, in my opinion, an evil man.  I think he hates this country and everything it stands for.  We’ve got nothing to fear from him.  I want to kick his ass.

It’s not a fight we could have avoided.  It won’t be because we’ve tweaked the original BBA, and turned it into the Reagan Amendment, and somehow provoked them.  They’ve been out to get us all along.  They proved that in Montana, before the idea of the Reagan Amendment came up.

Lisa Murkowski is in the Senate seat that I wanted, and her daddy gave her.  I knew her quite well, back in the day.  She’s over her head.  But she is an Alaskan, and she’ll want to help.  One of these days I’ll give her dad, Frank, a call and tell him about the Reagan Amendment.  I know what Frank will do.  He’ll tell his daughter to lend a hand.  Frank and I go back to 1980, when I was his deputy campaign manager.  They hired me to do a hit on Clark Gruening, the Democrat he was running against. I pulled it off, in spades, and Frank has liked me ever since.  He was running even with Gruening until I pulled my little stunt.  It put Frank ten points up, which is what he won by on election day.

When I got elected to the state senate Frank came to Juneau and stopped by to see me.  He knew I couldn’t stand Ted Stevens, and he wanted to tell me a story.  Stevens’ wife was pregnant and the old goat was very proud of himself.  He’s down in the basement of the Capitol, getting a massage from an old Swede, talking about how his wife is having a baby.  So the old Swede asks him, “Who do you suspect?”

Frank and I had a good laugh over that, I can tell you.  He really didn’t like the little prick either.

Well, maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but Oklahoma House Majority Whip Gary Banz says he’ll be at the Reagan Amendment Summit.  I’d be surprised if he’s not joined by others in Leadership.  The oil and gas industry is very powerful, or so I’m told, in the Oklahoma legislature.  The Kochs, and all that.  Those guys are going to love the Reagan Amendment.  That’s going to be helpful in Oklahoma, which has no federal land to speak of.  When you think about it this is an energy industry wet dream. That has its downside of course.  Our most implacable opposition will from the environmentalists, and they’re going to try to smear us as the running dogs of Big Oil.

As far as I know, no one involved in our effort has gotten a nickel from the oil industry, and I’d like to keep it that way.  We’re not looking for their money.  It would be used against us.  But if these guys want to explain a little reality to some of these chicken hearted Oklahoma legislators, the ones who are afraid of the Birchers, that would be O.K.

Like Alaska and Idaho, Oklahoma has issues which the Federal Land Commission which will have to be worked out.  They don’t have Indian Reservations, but they have a lot of land that is under some sort of tripartite sovereignty, with the feds, the State of Oklahoma, and the Indians each having a share.  It’s complicated, but it can all be worked out.

I called Gary because he’s a leader of the Assembly of State Legislatures.  Scott Bedke made the suggestion, and it was a good one.  They’re having an Executive Committee meeting in June that I won’t be able to get to.  The main meeting will be in Salt Lake on November 11th, and I can make that.  I don’t how the Reagan Amendment fits in with their thinking.  They’re dealing with Convention Procedure.  It may have no effect on it.  But it’s a big group of leaders from around the country, and I’ll get a chance to talk with a lot of people I haven’t met.  The Reagan Amendment Summit will have already occurred, so we should have a pretty good idea of where we stand.

I haven’t been able to get ahold of incoming NCSL President Curt Bramble, so I called our Utah sponsor, my friend Kraig Powell. He liked the Reagan Amendment.  He had some questions, of course.  It’s a lot to digest. He said Bramble is on the road, trying to renew conservative interest in NCSL, now that he’ll be the President.  I guess a lot of conservatives have been staying away, and he’s getting them back.  The Reagan Amendment Summit will be helpful to him in that respect.  I think he’s going to like it, a lot.  It might even somehow wind up on the official agenda of the NCSL meeting.  I’m going to ask, anyway.  Kraig asked me to lay it all out in an email, which he’ll forward to Bramble.  Then he’ll try and set up a conference call for the three of us.

The best part of what I’ve been doing these last 18 months is making friends.  When we decided to move back to California I got out a map and drew a line 100 miles East of the Bay Area.  That’s as close as I wanted to get.  So we wound up in Sonora, a nice place, rural.  We’ve been here fourteen years.  Neither of us has made one friend since we’ve been here.

So a little over a year ago I flew back to Salt Lake to meet Kraig and testify for our bill.  I talk about it here on the blog, back in the posts from March of 2014.  I really liked Kraig a lot.  In fact, I met a lot of people I liked.  Kraig told me I needed to talk to some of these guys at lunch, so I show up in the main plaza of the Capitol and sit down with around ten of them.  We eat lunch, and one guy says he’s going up to Petersburg, Alaska to shoot a black bear.  He starts complaining about the cost of Alaska guides, and that got my goat up.  I was friends with some of these guys.  From the NRA.  I tell him you don’t need a guide for black bear, and he says he knows that, he was talking about brown bear.  We kind of got into it on the whole guide business, so I decided to change the subject and talk about my hunting career.

I went out and got a moose.  Busted my ass packing that meat out, and butchering it.  That’s a lot of work.  I get the meat home and my wife won’t cook it.  Wasn’t wrapped in plastic, didn’t come from Safeway.  So Binky the polar bear, down at the Alaska zoo, got my moose.

They kind of liked that story, so I told them a few more.  I’ve got some good ones, if I do say so myself.

I feel like I made some friends in Utah.

Where is it now?  Five years ago CNBC’s Rick Santelli, God love him, went off on an on-air rant and started a movement.  Only in America.  Where are all the people who organized and worked  and helped take the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi?  Some of these organizations are still around, but I don’t think the movement is anything near to what they used to be.  Where is the energy, the determination to do something, to try and take the country back from the statists who are so disdainful of the Constitution and the tradition of American liberty?  Are these people discouraged, worn out, disillusioned, or what?

I didn’t follow the Tea Party that closely.  But I never heard them talk about Article V.  Like most professional politicians, they had no idea what it was, and what it was for.  It’s too bad.  Article V and the Tea Party were made for each other, a match made in heaven.  Article V is where the Framers gave power to the people. But that power must be exercised through their state legislatures.

These legislators, with few exceptions, have their finger on the public pulse.  They spend some time every year, or every other year, in their Capitol, but the vast majority are not professional politicians, or even lawyers.  They’re ranchers and teachers and real estate agents.  They have normal lives and are members of their communities just like everybody else.  They go to church, PTA meetings, and ball games.  They’re close to the people they represent. They listen.

Biddulph and the rest of the Task Force want the Tea Party to turn out on April 15th at the South Carolina and Oklahoma Capitols.  Those legislatures are balking at passing our bill, and need to know it has the support of their voters.  Think of all the work the Tea Party has done.  Some of it paid off, a lot of it didn’t.  Now they have a chance to do something really big, change the direction of the country not with laws, or elections, but with the Constitution that they all love.

It’s a matter of communication, of course.  If they knew, and understood, how this all worked I have no doubt they would rejuvenate themselves and join the fray.  I’m convinced this will happen, and soon.  It makes too much sense not to.  Perhaps the Reagan Project has a role to play.  We’re working on it.

Apropos of nothing, here’s story for you.  I’m a freshman at Cal in 1962, and a big conservative.  I ordered a Barry Goldwater sweatshirt from National Review and wore it a lot to class.  I’d sit in the middle of the front row of Wheeler Hall looking at this socialist lecture me in Political Science 101.  There were like 600 students in the class.  It was a complete waste of time.  I learned nothing.

I wore it to my Speech class too, but it only had about 30 students.  I didn’t quite understand what I was supposed to learn in it when I signed up for it.  At the end of the semester I still didn’t know.  It was all horseshit.  The Professor was a twitty little bastard, and I could tell he didn’t like my sweatshirt.  So one day, as an exercise in the art of speech that he was teaching us, he goes off on Goldwater.  He said, “What do we really know about anybody?  Take Barry Goldwater.  What do we really know about him?  We know he’s from Arizona, where he’s the senior United States Senator…..”  At this point I interrupt him, and say, “Actually, he’s the junior Senator from Arizona.”  I was probably smirking at him when I said it. I was kind of a cocky kid.  He really didn’t like that.

The son of a bitch gave me a “D”.  I never was much of a student.

According to Fox News First, a daily racing form on the presidential derby, today the R’s are ranked:

Bush, Walker, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Kasich, Fiorina, Perry, Huckabee and Christie.

Biddulph is going full steam ahead on Tax Day rallies on the steps of the Capitol in Columbia and Oklahoma City.  We want a presidential candidate at  both of them.  Bush and Christie are bad choices, mainly because they’re not popular with state legislators in these states.  Everybody else is fine.  We need to give Kasich first dibs.  He’s earned that.  If he declines we want Perry in South Carolina.  Sponsor Sen. Larry Grooms will do the invite.  John  Steinberger is the main man in South Carolina, and he thinks Grooms supported Perry in 2012.  Perry does have the remnant of an organization there, and is probably trying to rebuild it.

In Oklahoma sponsor Rep. Gary Banz will make the call.  We’ll see who he wants.  They’re all fine.

Looking forward, we should be able to get presidential candidates at all our major functions, including the Reagan Amendment Rally in Seattle on August 3rd.  Leaving out Bush and Christie, which I believe we should do, we’ve got at least eight to choose from.  They will all  be looking for venues to campaign in, an issue to embrace, and allies on the ground.  We’ve got it all.  Of course, the way I look at it the first candidate to wrap his arms around the Reagan Amendment will be the one to watch.

That’ll be the smart one.