The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.
The microphone on the recorder appears to be too sensitive; I MIGHT be able to clean up the audio, but from an initial listen on the inferior speaker, it’s pretty much hopeless.
Something I didn’t mention before; I did help out Geharty to get the Wi-Fi here before he retreated to the China Room
Brownback: “Iraq has been a heavy weight on this party.”
Pushing a consumption tax (note; he does not call it FairTax).
Q 1 – Are you disappointed in fundraising? – Nope.
Q 2 – What about Obama not wearing the flag pin? – Fashion is not the statement.
Q 3 – Are you concerned about government privatizing war? – We could outsource peeling potatoes, but we really shouldn’t outsource combat. We’re only spending 3.8% GDP now, we were at 6% under Reagan. We’re at 17% for health care.
Q 4 – Another fundraising question – We have as much money in the bank as some of the guys who raised $10 million. NASCAR reference (the tape will catch that).
Q 5 – Do you think you can break through with the Reagan Democrats? – I’ve done it before in Arkansas (62/38 Dem).
Q 6 from Leslie – (missed it as well)
Q 7 from the Row – How can you reconcile federalism with smoking bans, and another part on health care? – It’s a federalism issue, and I supported it as a workplace issue because the science has ended, and “you can’t spit out what you chew”.
Ron Paul just addressed a crowd of regular reporters and the bloggers on blog roll in the Senate Room.
Comparing his upswelling of online advocates to those of the leading contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, Paul noted that his 950 meet-up groups and network of Ron Paul bloggers came about spontaneously and without the help of hired online political operatives.
Paul is an opponent of NCLB (“No Child Left Behind”). He wants to return “responsibility to the schools, and hopefully more people would be able to opt out of the schools through vouchers or tax credits. Sending education money to Washington and then returning it with strings attached to school districts is not a good idea.”
Law of the Sea treaty? “No, I wouldn’t be interested in that. I’m interested in national sovereignty. I’m not looking for another level of government and when I see some of these treaties and international agreements it’s just another level of government. I’m not much interested in those.”
A blogger asks, “Why would a pro-Iraq war conservative support you?
Paul: “For fiscal reasons, if he can’t be persuaded that that [presumably, staying out of foreign entanglements] was our traditional conservative position. [The war] is flat out is going to break us. All great nations that spread themselves too thinly around the world go bankrupt. This is what happened to the Soviet empire.”
The professional journalists here tend to ask horse-race questions. One of them says, “Does Giuliani think he has this thing won?”
Paul: “There are signs of that.”
Up next: Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee.
Quickly reviewing his speech (thank you, Senator, even if nobody told you we didn’t have audio). He brought in the 2 1/2-foot-high handcart with the tax code.
Q 1 – (Sorry, missed it while I took pics of the tax code cart).
Q 2 – Why is there dissatisfaction with the front-runners? – It’s the issues…. We have to embrace our policies…. We need to have a political solution on Iraq?
Q 3 from the row –How are we going to have a voluntary flat tax alongside the current code? – It’s adding another option.
Congressman Ron Paul
Question 1 – What is your reaction to raising $5 million in Q3? – It refutes those who said that it’s just a few people who use the Internet…. The average has been $40…. Some have used their own money to prop up their bottom line.
#2 – How would you address poverty? – (It’s a good thing I have the tape recorder going; I can’t type fast enough). Paraphrasing – it’s the destruction of the currency and the trillions going overseas. No difference in the parties as far as out-of-control spending goes.
#3 – Can you compete with the other candidates on $5 million? – They don’t have much left in the bank…. We have more than ($5 million) in the bank…. As we gain credibility, the fundraising increases…. We don’t even know how many volunteers we have…they’ve all gone out independently.
#4 – On disadvantaged youth – It’s not the responsibility of the federal government, except for DC. They spend $13,000/student in DC, and it’s not very good…. You cannot do it by spending money you don’t have….
#5 – Do you think Giuliani is acting like he thinks he’s already won? – There’s signs of that.
#6 from the Row – (Too slow; will have to go back to the tape)
#7 – Would you sign LOST? – NO!
#8 from Fred – Why should a pro-war conservative support you? – For economic reasons. Comparing the Soviet collapse to the current situation.
While we don’t get sound from the main stage (Sam Brownback’s there now), and nobody’s come through yet to the podium (thankfully, I’m just off camera range), we do have some benefits:
– The aforementioned Mary Katharine Ham
– Jeff Kropf’s show. He’s had several people on, and now he’s got John Stossel.
Meanwhile, the mouse/media presenter/laser pointer I picked up ROCKS!!!
Ron Paul’s on stage, and I can hear the catcalls from Bloggers’ Row. Jim Geharty and the others in the China Room, which is now the overflow area, should have some fun.
Meanwhile, 2 chairs to my right is Mary Katharine. There go my knuckles.
In the hour I’ve been here in the Senate Room–headquarters for blogger’s row–I’ve been doing a quick post at my home blog, comparing requests for lover’s emails from New Jersey and Arkansas. E-mails: If you work for the government, don’t send love or sex e-mails on your government equipment. Just don’t.
In that hour, this room has exploded into a frenzy of activity. In one corner, we have radio talk show hosts interviewing a succession of guests, including Sen. Tom Coburn. Along the sides of the room, intent, focused bloggers staring at the screens, typing and occasionally (rarely) coming up for air.
Ron Paul is at the podium now, following an appearance by Giuliani.
Giuliani scored with this crowd with his Hillary humor but most of all when he said that the practice of earmarks is like the graffiti in New York City when he became mayor: Not the worst thing in the city, but proof that the process is broken.
Giuliani pledged that all anonymous earmarks will stop on “Day One” of his administration.
Revisions/corrections (10:15 am CDT – steveegg) – Changed the category to “Defending the American Dream”
Still no sound because Jeff Kropf is live, but we’ve at least got video. Jo’s abandoned us to try to get a listen.
I’m still catching up on missing yesterday.
Update – there’s sound and Wi-Fi in the Chinese Room.
We had some video, and there’s the start. Jeff Kropf started off his show with Sen. Jeff Colburn.
The rest of the folks in the house (will be updated as the room fills)…
American Infidels Company
Dry Fly Politics/The Mitt Report (doing double-duty)
Fox Politics (in fact, the lovely and talented Jo is sitting to my right on Bloggers’ Row)
GayPatriot
Human Events
KSKY (660 AM out of Dallas/Ft. Worth)
Leslie (sitting next to Fred; the second half of the double-barrel is going to be starting up presently)
PajamasMedia
Real Debate Wisconsin (Fred’s on the other table)
Right Angle Blog
The Sam Adams Alliance
Jim Geraghrty from National Review, who got shunted into the China Room (sorry about the misspell; D’OH!!!)
Mary Katharine Ham (the heavy hitters are now in the house)
Too many more to list, but Fred’s got most of them.
Vicki McKenna will be broadcasting the Milwaukee half of her show live from here as well, along with Jeff Kropf, 750 KXL out of Portland, Oregon.
Mini-pool television crew here (CBS/ABC/Fox; NBC and CNN aren’t here, and add Nippon Television Network as well as CNN). XM and MetroNetworks are doing radio coverage. AP’s doing the wire thing.
FINALLY, we’re live from the Mayflower in DC. The flight in was good, the Metro is pretty fouled up (even though Sean and Kevin swear by it), and incredibly, the Mayflower has neither wireless in the rooms nor free Internet.
Very quick summary of yesterday:
– We had a pretty good contingent on Midwest on the way out. It was a grease-job on the landing (about what I’d expect out of AB).
– The hotel wasn’t ready when we finally got in (instead of taking a couple cabs, we decided to try to take the Metro). Needless to say, Fred missed the White House briefing.
– Speaking of the Mayflower, they have neither wireless nor free Internet in the rooms. That explains a lack of posts yesterday.
– Traffic is about as bad as downtown Chicago (which tells you why Sean and Kevin both use the Metro).
– Sen. John McCain had a decent speech, though he hated a bit too much on the economy.
– Sen. Jim DeMint is a great speaker.
– Drinking Right East Coast with Sean and Kevin was a blast. Fred’s got a page full of random quotes, including one about the $7 Heineken at the hotel bar, ready to go.
(H/T – Asian Badger)
It seems that illegal aliens are counted in the census for the purpose of Representative apportionment. UPI reports on a University of Connecticut study that says that states with fewer invaders, like New York, Illinois and Ohio, are likely to lose House seats to states that have more invaders, like Arizona, Texas and Florida.
Fred, Mark Block, Leslie Graves, about 1,600 of my new closest friends, and I will be in DC tomorrow and Friday for Americans For Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream summit. Many of the Republican candidates for President will be there, including Sam Brownback, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson. No Runny Eggs will be bringing you double-barrel coverage, with Leslie joining me from Bloggers’ Row.
I’ve got my shiny almost-new camera (freshly loaded with a 2 GB memory card and a second in reserve), a digital voice recorder with USB transfer cable; all I need to do is pick up a spare battery for the laptop.
Update #1 (10:58 am 10/2/2007) – Hillary’s unofficial numbers are in
This will be updated and bumped up as the cash count comes in, so I don’t want to clutter Hot Air and Michelle Malkin’s blog with too many trackbacks on the initial run (5:05 pm 10/1/2007). Let’s go straight to the not-quite-official third-quarter numbers from the campaigns, with the caveat that the official numbers aren’t due into the Federal Election Commission until the 15th:
– Hillary Clinton checks in with $22 million for the primaries and $5 million for the general.
– Barack Hussein Obama raised over $19 million for the primaries and about $1 million for the general.
– Mitt Romney raised about $10 million and chipped in $6 million-$7 million from his bank accounts.
– Fred Thompson raised over $8 million, plus $3.5 million in June.
– John Edwards, who is taking several million dollars in public financing in exchange for being outspent about 2-1 by both Obama and Hillary Clinton, raised about $7 million and has $12 million on hand.
– Bill Richardson raised $5.2 million.
– John McCain allegedly raised about $5 million and is still over $2 million in the hole (the campaign isn’t talking).
– Joe Biden raised a bit under $2 million.
– Christopher Dodd raised $1.5 million and has $4 million on hand.
I’ve done a bit of rooting around and finally found a comment editor that looks halfway-decent, and with just a wee bit of modification, plays nicely with Filosofo Comment Preview – WP Ajax Edit Comments by Robert Huereca. You now have 15 minutes from the time you post a comment to edit that comment, your name/URI, or both.
I’ve also found a semi-replacement for Bad Behavior, which runs like molasses in January. Now, all comments (and allegedly, trackbacks/pingbacks) on threads with no activity for the past 15 days will go into the moderation queue if they survive Akismet.
First things first, I closed the “Who won’t be a candidate as of 10/1/2007?” poll as yesterday was 10/1. Congrats to the three people who saw that nobody would drop out.
I did encounter a problem between updating WordPress and WP-Polls; somehow, the number of voters was reset to the number of votes. I went back through the logs and manually corrected this. It should work properly now.
(H/T – Allahpundit/Hot Air Headlines)
The New York Times has a breathless headline – “Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts”. Let’s break out the chainsaw (gas-powered), shall we?
The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.
I sure seem to recall the Soviets using the Northern Sea Route. They may have needed nuclear-powered icebreakers that were floating Chernobyls, but they used it.
Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates….
Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water "” six Californias "” beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.
Since when is 28 years of measurement evidence that it was a once-in-a-century retreat?
Scientists are also unnerved by the summer’s implications for the future, and their ability to predict it.
Any non-sports profession that accepts a 30% failure rate over 3 days is not something that I’d trust to predict 3 decades into the future.
Complicating the picture, the striking Arctic change was as much a result of ice moving as melting, many say. A new study, led by Son Nghiem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and appearing this week in Geophysical Research Letters, used satellites and buoys to show that winds since 2000 had pushed huge amounts of thick old ice out of the Arctic basin past Greenland. The thin floes that formed on the resulting open water melted quicker or could be shuffled together by winds and similarly expelled, the authors said
OOPS! Guess it could have been something other than Gorebal “Warming”.
For one thing, experts are having trouble finding any records from Russia, Alaska or elsewhere pointing to such a widespread Arctic ice retreat in recent times, adding credence to the idea that humans may have tipped the balance.
Allow me to ReWrite™ that sentence to reflect a non-“religious” perspective – For one thing, experts are having trouble finding any records from Russia, Alaska or elsewhere pointing to either such a widespread Arctic ice retreat or lack of same in recent times, adding credence to the idea that humans may have tipped the balance nobody knows what is going on or why.
One more thing; sea ice is increasing in the Antarctic.
Guess it’s now my quest to link to every conservative Madison blogger. Madison Conservative, who runs Conservativism from the Progressive birthplace, gets on for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he hates Jim “Craps” Doyle (WEAC/Potawatomi-For Sale) as much as I do.
I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, but I just kept on putting it off. The Tygrrrrr Express should join the list of blogs you grab the feed for.
I’ll catch up on Weeks 2 and 3 soon (hopefully before Thursday; I do believe I’m 6-0 in the over/under department), but onward, onward, ever onward to the poorhouse:
Green Bay @ Minnesota (+3) – Dunno why Bodog’s line is so far out of whack with everybody else (just about everybody else is favoring the Pack by 1 1/2 points), but if the Man wants to give me the long 3 to take the Viqueens, so be it. Just as long as I don’t have to take them to win outright,….
Chicago @ Detroit (+3) – As Jimmy “Masterlock” Duggans would say, BUT YOU’RE NOT GONNA NEED THEM!
Oakland @ Miami (-4) – Culpepper’s return to Miami won’t be a pleasant one in this Game of the Weak.
Houston (-3) @ Atlanta – The Texans? Favored on the road? And the Egg’s taking them? It truly is a topsy-turvy NFL.
Baltimore @ Cleveland (+4) – Topsy-Turvy NFL part 2 – take the NewBrowns and take the over-40.
St. Louis @ Dallas (-14) – Again, Bodog’s line is a bit higher than everybody else’s (all the other lines are at Dallas -13). It doesn’t matter; the Lambs can’t score, and the Cowpokes can’t be stopped. As a side bet, take Wiggy’s head to explode when he finds out I took Dallas and the lumber.
NY Jets @ Buffalo (+3.5) – Yesterday’s college action proved it’s the weekend for upsets. This one will take the cake as the MASH Unit proves once again it’s J-E-T-S S*CK! SU*K! SUC*!
Tampa Bay (+3) @ Carolina – It pays to check the injury report. Take the under-39.5 for some extra cash on Upset Weekend.
Seattle @ San Francisco (+2.5) – GORE! GORE! GORE!
Pittsburgh (-6.5) @ Arizona – Why there isn’t a “1” in front of that 6.5 is beyond me. What isn’t beyond me is taking full advantage of that mistake.
Kansas City @ San Diego (-12.5) – Unlike the Pack, the Chefs have no passing offense.
Denver (+10) @ Indianapolis – Denver isn’t good enough to win, but they’re good enough to make a game out of this.
Philadelphia (-3) @ NY Giants – Olberdouche will be happy.
New England @ Cincinnati (+8) – Irresitable force, meet immovable object. Immovable object, meet movement. Irresistable force, meet stoppage.
I’m still playing catch-up from the move, so I’m a few days late. However, on Thursday, the House had a vote to recommit with instructions on the continuing appropriations bill to add a resolution supporting Gen. David Petraeus and condemn MoveOn.org (scroll a bit for the text). Dennis “The Menace” Kucinich couldn’t resist cozying up to George Soros and company, and neither could Tammy Baldwin or Gwen “Crybaby” Moore (H/T – Mary).
Incredibly, the rest of the ‘Rat delegation from Wisconsin, including Steve Kagen, elected by MoveOn, voted for the resolution. Guess David Obey and Ron Kind feel they’re fossilized untouchables, and Kagen feels he can spend as much as Herb Kohl to stifle any challenges. Heck, Obey had the line of the day – “I’ve got an obligation to be equally upset when that kind of juvenile debate emanates from the left.”
Equally-incredible, Ron Paul voted for this. Guess there really is a bright line between the Dhimms and the Pubbies, even if the latter spends almost exactly like the former or adopts their language vis-a-vis the military.
While the ‘Rat House leadership that was there (paging Queen Speaker, paging Ms. Pelosi, your votes are overdue) had a bit more savvy than their Senatorial counterparts when the vote finally came down, don’t let the vote fool you. There is a reason why the Pubbies had to pull a parliamentary move to get this through a week after a resolution went through the molasses pit known as the Senate.
Mary Katharine Ham delivers the perfect answer to PETA and Alicia Silverstone. Bonus points – unlike the PETA ad, this one is work safe.
Let’s go hunting.
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