Somwhere, Chris Shays and Jim Leach are laughing. But where's Katon in this story?

Florida governor Charlie ("I'm still relevant despite that stuff people just keep talking about that my recent marriage should have cleared up once and for all") has folded his Jim-Greer-Manque' feint for the GOP leadership, leaving NRO off, as usual, on their own planet:

Greer Endorses Steele -- But Does It Help?

My sources were right. Greer's statement:

Washington, D.C.—Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer today announced that he is not running for RNC Chairman and is supporting former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele in his bid for the Republican National Chairmanship.

“Michael has everything that the GOP desperately needs right now:  the ability to communicate our message from a fresh point of view, an appreciation of how we can use technology to build the party, and the ability to reach out to new voters,” noted Greer.  “Democrats are not the only people calling for change.  These are our priorities in Florida and they must also be our priorities on a national level.”

“I am grateful for Chairman Greer’s support,” said Steele.  “As the GOP Chairman in one of the largest states in the nation, Chairman Greer’s support is critical to our campaign and takes it to a whole new level. He has been recognized as one of the most dynamic and successful state party chairs in the country and I look forward to working with him closely.”

And a reader asks about the value of a Crist endorsement . . .

After reading your post about Greer/Crist possibly endorsing Michael Steele, I would have to wonder at the value of such an endorsement.

After all, wasn’t it Governor Crist’s endorsement prior to the Florida Republican primary that gave us John McCain as our standard bearer?

I'm not sure about that perspective. I figure if you're running for RNC Chair, you want the endorsement of every Republican short of Lincoln Chafee that you can get . . .

Invasion of the blog-snatchers

Strange things are afoot in the blogdom. Journalspace failed recently, victim of a strange and unrepairable server crash. Walk This Way, our favorite SC blog, got wiped out (now restored as Charleston Daily Photo, but all the posts, and the record of over 500,000 reader visits, is all gone.

Leonardo's Notebook says Twitter- the salvation of the GOP- has been hacked as well. 

Now comes word Soapblox, host to a number of liberal blogs, including one of the gay tribe's uber-sites, Pam's House Blend, has been hacked so severely it's out of business altogether.

If Waldo disappears suddenly, well, just buy a copy of Laura and remember the old boy in his prime.

Even Dr. Pangloss would agree you can only ride same-sex marriage phobias so far to get minority votes

Waldo's never been a fan of one-party rule. Don't make no never mind which party it is.

Which makes Andrew Sullivan's post today- and the tone-deafness whose evidence mounts daily among Republican leaders- all the more worrisome:

The End Of White America?

Could it also mean the demise of the GOP? Publius reacts to the notion that Republicans need to twitter more to attract the next generation:

I think the GOP's youth problem is actually a non-white problem. Obama won generally among 18-29 year old voters by 66-32. However, he won white 18-29ers by a more modest +11 margin. Thus, the larger youth gap comes from the fact that McCain (considered a more moderate GOPer) got absolutely shellacked among young non-white voters. Embracing social networking sites isn't going to help much with that particular problem.

And the country ain't gettin' any whiter.

If you haven't check out the Atlantic cover-story on this very theme, here it is.

Somewhre, Jefferson Davis is laughing

Here's the problem the SC GOP is least- if at all- equipped- to address; the beiging of America:

The non-CPA member of the CPA Club goes to Washington

Waldo, typing furiously in his bath, was inclined to give senator-wannabe Roland Burris the benefit of the doubt until Christopher Buckley revealed (apparently after some serious magnifier time) some of the things "Senator Burris" wants to be remembered for in all time:

Burris is a mediocrity, an Illinois party hack whose sole apparent accomplishment was to break a color barrier back when Jimmy Carter was president. (Good for him, but that’s a pretty dried laurel by now.) His justification for accepting the honor of a senatorial appointment from tainted hands? “The appointment is legal.”

Sad to say, he may actually have a point. To his credit, the Illinois secretary of state, an African-American with the Dickensian name of White, has admirably and stoutly refused to certify the malodorous appointment.

Burris’ chief ally, meanwhile, nursing a grudge against Obama for trying to take his House seat, was quick to play the race card; more like a royal flush of race cards. Anyone, he said, trying to block Burris’s path to the Senate is nothing more than a modern-day George Wallace or Bull Connor. He took care to use the word “lynch” in his summa on behalf of Mr. Burris.

But then he is only rallying to the cause of a man who has already written himself into the sinverguenza hall of shame, by erecting a tombstone of truly laughable self-glorification. It bears the seal of the (at the moment, rather less than) great state of Illinois. Below that it proclaims

TRAIL BLAZER

First African-American in Illinois

To Become

At the bottom of what amounts to page one, it says:

S.I.U. Exchange Student to University of

Hamburg Germany 1959-60

The list is continued on Slab Two, which is headed:

OTHER MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The latest entry (cue trumpet fanfare):

Board of Directors, Illinois C.P.A. Society

First Non-CPA Member: 2000

It’s no more for me to tell someone how to write his epitaph than it is to murmur approval of a life ended in suicide, but this is “Ozymandias”—

And on that pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

—as re-written by The Onion. And demonstrates, yet again, the futility of satire in modern-day America. Twain, thou shoulds’t be living at this hour…

A sprint that's more of a saunter

The President, who is "sprinting to the finish" doing nothing, is packing up early, but at the same time can't spare Blair House to the President-elect.

The White House said Tuesday that President Bush, never one to procrastinate, has started the process of packing his belongings for when he leaves the White House later this month.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president and the first lady do not have a lot to move to their newly purchased house outside of Dallas, and joked that reporters shouldn’t expect to “see a big Ryder truck pulling up to the White House.”

Perino noted that the president, first lady and current White House staff only have “14 days and about 18 minutes” until their time at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. comes to a close.

To that end, she said, the president and his staff are starting to get ready for the move to make way for incoming President-elect Obama, his family and staff.

“The president’s style is always to be one that’s a little bit prepared early, and he and Mrs. Bush have been working to box things up,” Perino said. “They didn’t come with a lot of things; they didn’t bring a lot of furniture here. So mostly what they have are books, obviously their clothes, and then some of the things that they’ve picked up along the way on their travels as they’ve traveled.”

Perino noted that current events have delayed a lot of the staff from packing up and shutting down.

“Well, part of the thing is, is that when the president said we would sprint to the finish, I think he really meant it, and we’re all panting trying to keep up behind him,” she said.

"Politics," he said, "is the art of controlling your environment. "

It's a generational thing. If you were around during the heyday of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone's grandly-styled "National Affairs Desk,"  then you probably loved the Typing Pharmacopeia that was his oeuvre.

Thanks to Joan Perry, who has rebounded from the Journalspace catastrophe to launch Charleston Daily Photo, we have access to a series of Hunter S. Thompson Motivational Posters (a la that stuff in the airline catalogues), of which this (above) is Waldo's Own Personal Favorite.

Dawson says: sit back and wait for the Ds to screw up, and winning in SC is oh, so, hard....

Since there's no transcript generally available, here's some excerpts of Ana Marie Cox's account of the RNC chair debate. Poor Massa Dawson, he's gonna be stuck in Columbia and minus his country club:

In the wake of the “Magic Negro” controversy, the number of men running for Republican Party chair reflects both their identity crisis and their excruciatingly narrow brand.

The most telling moment at the debate among contenders for the chairmanship of the Republican Party might have been when they took turns bragging about how many friends they had on Facebook. The spectacle of six grown men comparing an accomplishment that only 18-year-olds should be really proud of did not seem to bode well for a party that is struggling to maintain purchase on the 21st century. (For the record, former Ohio state attorney general Ken Blackwell wins with around 4,000.) Their measure of each others' followers on Twitter (Michigan state party chair Saul Anusiz has just under 3,000) might have been embarrassing also except that a few minutes earlier, current RNC chair Mike Duncan referred to it as "the Twitter," that definite article condemning him to Old Fogey status among anyone who cares.

“If we don't get it together, Barack Obama is going to be ripping us a new one for eight years.”

The Facebook/Twitter showdown resonated for those that use Twitter, but in the moment it wasn't clear how being the most friended Republican would come across with the 168 actual committee members who actually vote on the position. They are exactly as representative of the Republican Party as you'd expect and do not Twitter. But committee members say that the fall taught them a valuable lesson about technology, only the least of which is that it is possible to use "friend" as verb.

Louis Pope, a committeeman from Maryland and supporter of former Lieutenant Gov. Michael Steele, said that the discussion of social networks was "absolutely" important, though he admitted he was not himself a member of any: "It's like with a parent or something. When it comes to technology, you understand what your kids are saying when they talk about it, but when it comes to fixing it or using it, you ask your kids." In other words, RNC has finally decided to do something about the VCR blinking 12:00...

...Even with constituents, the slice of the American public that truly cares about who will be the next RNC chair is admittedly small. (Norquist counted the debate's 400 person attendance a rousing success.) Party chairs can be figureheads or functionaries, rainmakers or fixers, but they are rarely very visible; they do, however, say a lot about what the party thinks of itself. Steele was probably right when he told the crowd at the debate, "It says something about where our party's at that we have this collection of people sitting up here," but he neglected to specify what that something was.

Stylistically, the group would not have been out of place at convention of moderately successful account managers, their personalities probably not quite varied enough to make up the cast of ensemble television series. Blackwell was deliberate yet strangely amped up. He repeatedly referred to the GOP needing to be "both high tech and high touch." Combined with his ability to "poke" others on Facebook, one could get the wrong idea. Anuzis is betting on the GOP being ready for a leader with a goatee (but without horns and a tail). Steele was polished and acrobatic in his attempts to address the entire ballroom from his seat on the far end of the dais. Chip Saltsman, the perky former campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, and Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, were there primarily as foils. In what might be the most welcome signal of just how much the Republican Party has changed already, both men are now considered long shots because of actions interpreted as insensitive to blacks: Saltsman sent out a tacky CD and Dawson wasa member of a whites-only country club (which, to be fair, is less "insensitive" than mildly horrifying).

UPDATE: WaPo's Dana Millbank makes it out even worse , if that's possible:

The way Republicans are attacking themselves, who needs Democrats?

"You have Republicans scratching their head, going: 'Who are we? What do we believe in? What do we stand for?' " said Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland.

"We have done a very poor job in communicating," added Chip Saltsman, former chairman of the Tennessee GOP.

"The hypocrisy, more than anything else, has killed our party," agreed Saul Anuzis, chairman of the Michigan Republicans. "We had become the bums."

And these are the guys who want to lead the party. The half a dozen men vying to be Republican National Committee chairman assembled at the National Press Club for a debate yesterday, but it quickly turned into a duel over who could best disparage their president and their party. Even the incumbent chairman, Mike Duncan, who is running for another term, warned that "if we don't do something about it, we're going to be the permanent minority in this country."

Luckily, all six RNC candidates agreed on a solution to the party's woes: They would say Ronald Reagan's name over and over, as if it were a tantric incantation.

Anuzis quoted Reagan in his opening statement. Former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell lamented that too many Republicans "campaign like Ronald Reagan and then govern like Jimmy Carter." Saltsman talked about his high school days: "Ronald Reagan was president, and he got me excited."

Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, tried to top that. "I was inspired as a college graduate by a fellow who walked in the room by the name of Ronald Reagan."

Grover Norquist, the moderator and head of Americans for Tax Reform, asked each candidate to name his favorite Republican president. The tally: Reagan, 6; Lincoln, 0. "Okay, everybody got that one right," the moderator announced.

The questions changed, but the same answer kept coming. Steele spoke of what "Ronald Reagan moved us to realize." Blackwell quoted Reagan two more times, prompting Steele to remind everybody that he was "inspired by the rhetoric and the words and the reality of a Ronald Reagan."

"And if you take a look at the constituency that we're losing today, it's the Reagan Democrats," Anuzis offered, for the session's 16th and final mention of the 40th president.

All the talk about the 1980s must have been a welcome respite for the Republicans, whose current situation is rather less memorable. The résumés of the men on the stage served as reminders of the GOP's problems: Duncan, who presided over the party's electoral debacle in November; Anuzis, who watched the GOP implode in Michigan; Dawson, a former member of an all-white country club. Then, of course, there was Saltsman, who mailed party members a CD with the parody song "Barack the Magic Negro." Saltsman's indiscretion has dominated the race, but moderator Norquist, a devoted Republican, was kind enough not to ask the candidates about the Magic Negro. Instead, he led them on a painful discussion about the Grand Old Party's efforts to appeal to the young.

"We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today," Duncan ventured.

"Let me just say that I have 4,000 friends on Facebook," contributed Blackwell, putting his hand on Dawson's and Anuzis's knees. "That's probably more than these two guys put together, but who's counting, you know?" Acknowledged Saltsman: "I'm not sure all of us combined Twitter as much as Saul."

Anuzis claimed he had "somewhere between 2- and 3,000" Facebook friends, which prompted Blackwell to remind the audience that he has 4,000 friends on the social networking site by waving four fingers behind Anuzis's head.

The candidates were significantly more comfortable when asked how many guns they own. Duncan claimed four handguns and two rifles, Anuzis boasted of two, and Blackwell replied: "Seven -- and I'm good."

"In my closet at home," replied Saltsman, "I've got two 12-gauges, a 20-gauge, three handguns and a .30-06. And I'll take you on anytime, Ken."

Even talk of their prized firearms, however, did not engage the candidates as much as their criticism of President Bush and the party they would lead.

"It's not the easiest thing in the world right now to be a Republican," Steele began, setting off 90 minutes of self-flagellation: "We are looked at being to some degree a party that is not friendly to minorities. . . . We lost our way. . . . Republicans should've had a little bit more you-know-what. . . . Obama caught us with our pants down. . . . They've bested us. . . . We can no longer afford to talk one way and behave in another." Norquist invited the candidates to name the biggest mistake of the Bush administration, and the answers tumbled out: The economic bailout. Greater deficits. Mishandling the Iraq war. Hurricane Katrina. Social Security. Immigration.

At one point, Anuzis had trouble even calling himself a Republican. "I have not been a lifelong Democrat," he said. "Republican," he corrected. "I actually became a Democrat," he went on. "Republican," he corrected again, "during my high school years."

Norquist invited the candidates to name their "least favorite Republican president," coaching them that "it's safe to go with the dead ones."

Replied Dawson: "We've got a few of those in the party right now."

NRO seems to be plumping Dawson, however: they're the only blog to give him more than the obligatory one quote and reference to  his country club:

(Katon Dawson mentioned at least twice that he was an RNC member, and there is a sense that some of those voting in the election believe that the next leader should come from within the committee.)

Afterwards, there was broad consensus that incumbent chairman Mike Duncan seemed flat and had the toughest case to make, that the guy who had been at the helm the past two years was the right guy to change the organization’s direction. He said he wasn’t on Twitter, but that one didn’t have to use a technology to understand it; his point was undermined when he asserted you can access Twitter through the Republican Party’s web site. Some members of the audience loved the question on number of Twitter and Facebook followers; others thought it looked silly to watch middle-aged men bragging about how many Facebook followers they have. All of the candidates agreed that Michigan chair Saul Anuzis was the undisputed king of Twitter.

No mention was made of the racially tinged controversies that encircled two of the candidates: Dawson’s past membership in a whites-only country club and Chip Saltsman’s distribution of a Paul Shanklin CD that included the song “Barack the Magic Negro.” Asked by a reporter if he felt the story had blown over, Saltsman said, “I think so.” Asked if he felt the story had been hyped during a traditionally slow news period around the holidays, he said, “I agree with that.” (One observer noted that the Saltsman controversy may hurt Dawson as well, as the two reinforced a theme of racial insensitivity that GOP critics love to emphasize.)

Perhaps Saltsman’s best moment came when he pointed out that the country was facing a new economic model in which government in the form of President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Reid determines the winners and losers, not the market. He also had a cute point about throwing out leaders who tell young people, "you’re the future"; he preferred leaders who recognize that young Republicans are the backbone of the party right now.

Among the comments that stood out to me:

Michael Steele on the banking bailout: “Republicans should have had more you-know-what to withstand the pressure."

Ken Blackwell, quoting Reagan: "'Status Quo' is Latin for 'the mess we're in.'"

Katon Dawson on Ron Paul fans: “I want people in my party who are willing to hang off bridges and paint their cars and show all kinds of enthusiasm.”

Ken Blackwell: “Young people today have the Internet. When I was growing up, we had the ‘auntie-net’ — and it moved information just as fast.”

Katon Dawson: “The Democrats are about to give us a gift by overreaching.”

Ken Blackwell: “I think I’ve won more races than anyone else on this stage, other than maybe my friend Katon, who’s won races in that key swing state of South Carolina.”

Katon Dawson: “Ken thinks winning in my state is easy, but it's hard.”

A nice irony

Cardinal says credit crisis has killed capitalism

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has declared that capitalism is dead because of the credit crunch.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, 76, made the astonishing claim at a lavish fund-raising dinner at Claridges which secured pledges of hundreds of thousands of pounds for the catholic church.

The Cardinal, dressed in his full clerical regalia, said in a speech at the black tie dinner that he had worried whether the dinner should go ahead because of the troubled economic times.

But he went on to say that in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin wall, that "communism had died". In 2008, he said, " capitalism had died".

The remarks will cause dismay in Downing Street as the Cardinal's remarks will be interpreted as a signal that the entire economic order has collapsed.

The Government has clashed with the Cardinal before over homosexual adoption, abortion and the Embryology Bill. One Whitehall source said: "We would like the church to work with us, not against us."

The remark caused astonishment in the ballroom, where the dinner was held, to launch an £8 million Faith in the Future appeal for money for the work of the bishops in England and Wales.

One guest who was present, who declined to be named, said: "I could hardly believe my ears. The Cardinal announced that, in his view, that Communism had died in 1989 and capitalism had died in 2008 because of the credit crisis.

"His remarks were part of a carefully considered thesis that it was capitalism that had got us into this mess and had died because of it. It was not just remarkable that he thinks that but it was remarkable that he said it in a room packed with some of the richest and most influential catholics in the land. Those same capitalists pledged a six figure sum to the church appeal."

The four course dinner, with a champagne reception, had been provided free of charge by Derek Quinlan, the property developer, who owns Claridges who is worth an estimated £60 million.

Sir Rocco Forte, the hotelier and prominent Roman Catholic, was in charge of the decoration. He decked out the ballroom in red flowers and red lights to match the Cardinal's clerical outfit.

The guest list included Baroness Williams, the Lib Dem peer and former Labour Cabinet minister, Lord Brennan, the Labour peer, Lord Guthrie, the former Chief of Defence staff, the Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, and a clutch of bishops from England and Wales.

Nicola Benedetti, the violinist, serenaded the guests and Julie Etchingham, the presenter of the ITV News at 10, compèred the proceedings.

Katon says 2 paint UR car

Massa Dawson thinks Warren Harding was the worst Republican president, and he hearts the Paulines:

“I saw the Paul movement in my state,” says Dawson. “We’re a party that needs excitement, and people painting their cars, and putting signs on overpasses.”

Regardless of party, members of Congress are always years behind their constituents

From a New Yorker profile, a snapshot of congressional cluelessness:

In 1986, Frank approached Tip O’Neill on the House floor to tell him that a forthcoming book would refer to Frank as a gay man. “He said, ‘Oh, Barney, don’t listen to that crap,’ ” Frank recalled. “They say stuff like that about all of us.’ I said, ‘Well, Tip, it’s true.’ And he sort of slumped in his chair and said, ‘Oh, Barney, I’m so sad. I thought you might be the first Jewish Speaker.’ ” (O’Neill, who had little facility for contemporary slang, prepared his staffers by saying that Frank had decided to “come out of the room.”) 

Is there an electoral glass ceiling in the South?

Left: Congressman Mel Watt's famous "Interstate 85" district, in red


538.com has a thoughtful piece today on why there aren't more African-Americans in Congress and state governorships. He wonders if a big chunk of the reason lies in the safety-valve of congressional politics the last twenty years:

I suspect that a lot of the problem, however, is that as Congressional Districts have become more and more gerrymandered, leading to the creation of more and more majority-minority districts following the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the black political apparatus has become more and more 'ghettoized'. Black candidates have not had to develop a message that appeals to white voters, because most of them don't have very many white voters in their districts (about half the nation's African-American population is limited to the 60 blackest Congressional Districts). Nor do they have very many conservative voters in their districts, and so they have not had to develop a message that appeals to conservatives, even though the black population itself is far more diverse in its political views than is generally acknowledged.

Because they are not very representative of their states as a whole, moreover, these districts are also not likely to be very good launching pads for ascension to the Senate or to the governor's mansion. Do I think Jesse Jackson Jr. would have some trouble winning statewide office? I do -- but I also think that Pete Stark, who lives in a mostly white and Asian but extremely liberal district in the Bay Area, would have trouble becoming a senator in California.

Conversely, of course, the majority-minority districts drain black voters from surrounding districts, and so white politicians have not had to develop messages that appeal to black voters. This may be particularly problematic for Republicans, who went from winning 16-18 percent of the black vote for the Presidency in the 1970s to only about half of that now.

Democrats ought to be mindful of these things when redistricting occurs again after 2010, aggressively challenging Republicans on both the wisdom and the legality of creating ghettoized Congressional Districts. Majority-minority districts harm Democrats by creating surplus Democratic votes, and in the long run, they probably hurt African-Americans too.

Talk about a paper trail!

Can a comedian turned polemicist stand a chance of being taken seriously in the US Senate? The Daily Beast predicts apparent-Senator Al Franken is in for six years as an ideological pinata, no matter when else he accomplishes:

Now Franken is poised to become that rare politician whose very existence is a wedge issue to be exploited.

For GOP talkers and apparatchiks, Franken's resume is almost too good to be true. He pushes such time honored Republican buttons as hatred of Hollywood entertainers (in addition to Franken's own celebrity, many top stars have donated to his campaign), anti-elitism (he’s a Harvard graduate), and prudishness (his dirty jokes were a constant source of attacks during the Senate campaign). As if that weren't enough, many commentators like Sean Hannity have suggested that the complicated recount process has been less than aboveboard, raising the specter that a Franken win will be illegitimate.

FOX News commentator Bernard Goldberg, who has been criticized in Franken's books, believes Franken is a natural target for conservatives given his high profile and combative style.

"I think what irks conservatives more about Franken than other liberal Democrats is that a lot of liberal Democrats are nice guys," Goldberg said. "Franken is seen as a mean-spirited, nasty guy—a smart ass."

16 days-

"Are any of the disputed voters black?"

Jones on Politics does a masterful job of  tracking the links between SC GOP operatives, SC state rep. Wallace Scarborough, who doesn't know what "You lost, dude" means, and Karl Rove's Mine-Me, Hans von Spakowsky, who recently penned an ode to his dad's immigrant faith in all Americans being equal.

"Some nut in China"

A hero whose insight was nearly quashed: 

In 1937, while a lieutenant in an intelligence outfit in Shanghai, when the Japanese were trying to conquer China, he used a telephoto lens to take pictures of Japanese landing craft with a square bow that became a retractable ramp, enabling troops and equipment to be dispatched quickly onto an enemy beach.

Envisioning those ramps as answering the Marines’ needs in a looming world war, Lieutenant Krulak showed the photographs to his superiors, who passed on his report to Washington. But two years later, he found that the Navy had simply filed it away with a notation saying it was the work of “some nut out in China.”

He persevered, building a balsa wood model of the Japanese boat design and discussing the retractable ramp concept with the New Orleans boat builder Andrew Higgins. That bow design became the basis for the thousands of Higgins landing craft of World War II.

“There would not have been a Normandy or an Okinawa or an Iwo Jima without that boat,” his son Charles said in an interview on Sunday.

GOP Chair Race, Part VI: The Revenge of the Paulines

More proof the Old Confederacy & Buffalo Commons Crowd needs to get with the technology:

1. Go to the Americans for Tax Reform website to get access to the GOP debate and questions from readers, sign in, and you get this:

RNCDebate	Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 10:33 PM
To: xxxxx
Thanks for registering for RNCDebate.org. To confirm your registration so you can participate in the site by asking and voting on questions, participating in quotes, and watching the debate when it airs live on January 5 at 1 PM EST, please confirm your registration by clicking this link. Also, help promote the site on Digg:  http://digg.com/politics/RNC_Chairman_Debate_You_Submit_the_Questions_Here http://www.rncdebate.org/confirm_email.php?c=4q5hnrk4pugkkc23szjp7ma77pquhs5a&u=2935 And there's no link to click! So you go back to the site, resend the confirmation, and you get the same thing. But you can read, at least, the questions of the people who somehow got registered, the first three of which are these gems:

This questions maybe presented to each RNC Chair candidate. RNC Vice Chairman James Bopp's resolution against the bailout is a much needed first step in moving the party back to traditional fiscal conservative values. Do support the resolution? ex animo davidfarrar

davidfarrar | PERMALINK | January 04, 2009 • 10:27PM | Q#: 782 | Vote TOTAL: 0   

1. Will you advocate for effective protection of the southern border (wall, encouraging governors to send their NG units for training there, etc.)? 2. Will you unequivocally support the 2nd amendment, without mealymouthed exceptions for "assault weapons"?

Daniel Day | PERMALINK | January 04, 2009 • 10:25PM | Q#: 781 | Vote TOTAL: 3   

Will you regularly consult with Ron Paul about all important business facing the Republican Party, and take his advice without question? Because you really should.

Martin Finnucan | PERMALINK | January 04, 2009 • 10:15PM | Q#: 780 | Vote TOTAL: -1   

"Get thee to a word-nunnery!"

Lake Superior State University, which is not a character in a David Lodge novel , has released its 2008 list of  words that need to be banished from the English language. Waldo, typing furiously in his bath, grunted, "I agree with the entire list."

Our favorite is a reader comment about the term "Surge": 

This word came out in the context of increasing the number of troops in Iraq. Can be used to explain the expansion of many things (I have a surge in my waist) and it's use will grow out of control…The new Chevy Surge, just experience the roominess!" – Eric McMillan, Mentor, Ohio.

You can also look up the university's banishees for the last 32 years, including Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's bete noire, "you know," (1978); "my bad" (1998); "world class" (1992); and "webinar" (2005 and 2008).

The Bony One may not be able to speak but her writing hand still poisons-

Ann Coulter, jaw wired shut or no, seems to be increasingly stuck in the Madonna/Howard Stern Trap: she has to get more outrageous all the time to stay some kind of relevant.

It's a shtick that eventually palls: Madge took some years off being an English country matron before dumping Guy Ritchie and launching her talons on tour again; Stern opted for a huge contract and radio silence in the free airwaves when he went to Sirius.

So now Coultergeist, as Mr Olbermann calls her, considers fashion an element of public policy while indulging her curiously recurrent homosexual fantasies:

Right-wing flame thrower Ann Coulter blasts incoming First Lady Michelle Obama as a freakishJacqueline Kennedy Onassisimitator in a book to be published next week.

In her latest screed, titled "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and their Assault onAmerica," Coulter accuses the liberal left of playing the victim when in fact, she argues, they are the victimizers.

As usual, Coulter throws plenty of bombs herself.

Lashing out at the President-elect's wife, Coulter wrote, "Her obvious imitation of Jackie O's style - the flipped-under hair, the sleeveless A-line dresses, the short strands of fake pearls - would have been laughable if done by anyone other than a media-designated saint."

Coulter said Cindy McCain, the wife of vanquished GOP nominee John McCain, "dressed well without freakishly imitating famous First Ladies in history."

Coulter facetiously and snidely refers to Michelle Obama as a "saint" and "Mother Teresa" and suggests that her public service career "advanced in lockstep with the political advancement of her husband."

In the book, Coulter repeatedly refers to the President-elect as "B. Hussein Obama" and complains that the media "literally wanted to have sex with him."

Stick a fork in Dawson- he's done

Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state, has snapped up the endorsement of two dozen of the rightest of the right wing elders and kids on the make in the Republican orbit, Politico reports:

Here's the full list of conservatives who are endorsing Blackwell today:  Gary Aldrich, Chairman, CNP Action Inc., age 63. Morton C. Blackwell, Virginia Republican National Committeeman, 69. Robert B. Bluey, Contributing Editor, RedState, apparently 20-something. L. Brent Bozell, Founder and President, Media Research Center, 53 Kellyanne Conway, CEO and President, the polling company, inc./WomanTrend, 41  T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., Former Domestic Adviser to President Reagan, 59  James C. Dobson, Ph.D., Founder and Chairman, Focus on the Family, 72  Becky Norton Dunlop, President, Council for National Policy , fifty-ish Stuart W. Epperson, Chairman, Salem Communications Corp. ,72 Steve Forbes, Chairman & CEO, Forbes Media, 61  Dr. Ronald Godwin, Vice Chancellor, Liberty University  Rebecca Hagelin, Author and Conservative Columnist, 45-ish  Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring, 60-ish David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union, 63  Tim LaHaye, Founder and President, Tim LaHaye Ministries, 82  Ed Meese, Past President, Council for National Policy, 77  James C. Miller, Past President, Council for National Policy, 66  Tony Perkins, President Family Research Council, 45  Ken Raasch, Chairman & CEO, Creative Brands Group  Alfred S. Regnery, Publisher, The American Spectator, 66  Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum, 84  Pat Toomey, President, Club for Growth, 47  Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com, 75 These endorsers are Blackwell's groundhogs: sighting  them means four more years of arguing tax cuts  for the wealthy,  abortion repeal, and generalized gay-bashing. In other words, they haven't learned a thing.

...and to think some bloggers believe Waldo is mean.

Codswallop: try on London mayor Boris Johnson for size:

Mr. Johnson won a safe Tory seat in Parliament in 2001 while keeping a foot in journalism. He looked finished in politics on numerous occasions. He is a walking Bartlett's of political incorrectness. A Boris campaign pitch: "Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3." On Portsmouth: "[A city of] drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs." On Liverpool, after a Liverpudlian was beheaded in Iraq: "Wallow[ing in] victim status . . . and their sense of shared tribal grievance about the rest of society."

On London hosting the 2012 Olympics, spoken while in Beijing this summer: "I say to the world: Ping Pong is coming home!" On his talent for gaffes (see entries above): "My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." On himself: "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon, there lurks a blithering buffoon....[of a potential election]- Bring it on!" says Mr. Johnson, lighting up. "My message to Gordon Brown through the Wall Street Journal is: You great big quivering gelatinous invertebrate jelly of indecision, you marched your troops up to the top of the hill in October of [2007]. Show us that you've got enough guts to have an election June 4. Gordon: Man or Mouse?!"

His press aide shakes her head, puts it in her hands and laughs. Boris Johnson is enjoying himself.

After everyone else weighs in, Massa Katon speaks

Atlas at Indigo Bunting has run Katon Dawson to ground on the Magic Negro Songbook.

They were?

The New Right says bigotry is bad and needs extirpating, sort of :

The Right needs to do much, much more to condemn bigotry and purge itself of the bigots.  However, Paul Krugman's attempt to smear the Republican Party and opposition to big government is simply callous race-baiting, and we shouldn't tolerate that sort of smear.  Krugman's article isn't about real racism - the only example he cites is a satire that was popularized by lefties, Spike Lee and David Ehrenstein; it was tone deaf and poorly concieved for an RNC candidate to pass it on, yes, but that is categorically different than the virulent racism to which Krugman refers.

Krugman's op-ed is about a narrative that Krugman has constructed to paint limited government itself as merely a form of racism; it is a Lefty equivalent to the ridiculous John Birch Society accusation that liberalism = secret support for Stalin's massacres.

Of course, the Birchers were kicked out of the Right.  The Left doesn't seem similarly inclined.

Tell it to Congressman Ron Paul, a member of the House Republican Caucus and past candidate for the republican nomination for president, after he spoke to the Birchers' 2008 convention (C-SPAN vid here ). 

How soon can you start?

Think of it as a sort of Educational Rapture.

No more grandstanding Irmo High principals; no more book bannings; no more claptrap about intelligent design; no more guff about prayer in school, prayer at football games, prayer over the crappy un-nutritious, underfunded meals at school, prayer at graduation prayer before football, baseball and basketball games (never mind tennis, they're all gay)... all in all, Sunlit Uplands has stumbled upon a truly fine idea:

Critics of America's public school system have launched a new effort highlighting the need for Christians to exit the system.

SC band will play Obama parade

Congrats to the Manning High School band and its many friends who have raised the scratch needed to let the band accept President-elect Obama's invitation to march in the inaugural parade.

Congrats, too, to The Blogland of Earl Capps, where the challenge of raising a lot of cash fast made it into the blogdom. 

And while we're at it, congrats on Anaconda's Sally Field moment.

"Why, some of my best friends are [fill in the blank]

Prince, doing a bit of spindoctoring in the LA Times , says:

He did not vote for Proposition 8. In fact, he didn't vote at all. "I didn't vote for Obama either," he explained. "Jehovah's Witnesses haven't voted for their whole inception." The controversy over a recent New Yorker "Talk of the Town" item, which Prince feels implied he supported the gay-marriage ban, has upset him. It's the first thing he wanted to discuss when the Web geeks had gone and we were alone. "I have friends that are gay and we study the Bible together," he said. He added that two sides fighting "only benefit the third person" who instigated the fight.

Or, as Yogi Berra said, "When you see a fork in the road, take it."

Will Rogers' famous line, "I belong to no organized political party- I'm a Democrat," seems to be increasingly applicable across the aisle. At The Next Right the debate on the way forward is coming to a fork in the road:

From The Muppet Movie (1979). As one would expect of a 

Hollywood production, Fozzie Bear and his Studebaker are going left.

There is no basic disagreement here, but conservatives are balkanizing into "ideas" or "tech" camps needlessly. Because of the magnitude of the GOP loss, there is an unfortunate sense that we don't know where to begin. Fixing any one thing would not have stemmed the tide.That's why we need to at least try to fix everything starting now. That means revamping our ideas and rebuilding our infrastructure. These are not mutually exclusive. Those arguing that we need to do one before we do the other, or at the expense of the other, are part of the problem.

When bread is short, beef up the circus

With SC unemployment pushing toward what is expected to be 14% this year, massive spending cuts, and an unemployment comp system that's broke, some of the almost entirely male legislature's more conservative members want to take another run at abortion. 

Here's the link to the bill.

Makes sense from a political standpoint. Can't get blood from a turnip budget-wise. Raising taxes? No way. So you might as well throw in some red meat for the base. What else will there be to do?

The governr's indicating he'll sign the bill if passed, as he did an older sibling bill last session. 

Which, if nothing else, underlines the incoherence of what "libertarian" means.

Not a job with much incumbency

A Portuguese woman who held the title of oldest living person for just five weeks has died at the age of 115.

What if?

It's admittedly a waste of effort trying to get the Big Swingin' Blogs of South Carolina to admit they read anything but themselves, but assuming- just as a thought experiment- that they do, and assuming- again, just as an experiment- they could consider a single unorthodox idea:

-what if a city in South Carolina elected a gay mayor?

Portland, Oregon offers a template. They have one. He didn't run on it. His opponents didn't run against it (one big diff from what would happen here). It was just part of who the man was- and is. He doesn't promote it, neither does he deny it.

"I'm running not to be a gay mayor, but a great mayor," he said.

All of which loops back around to one of our hobby horses here at WLJ: economic development.

The world is changing- fast.We have to think in new ways looking into a downturn that may last for years, in a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation before things get really grim.

 Southern economic development  strategies can't just rely on offering a pliant, subsidized, non-union work force any more. Even South Carolina is in a fight for the best and the brightest, even as its vaunted Knowledge Sector Council toys with old-school notions of raiding state pensions funds to create a new slush pile to get Google to build another server farm that employs 9,000 server racks and three people, for example. Or getting disposable-income-dependent Starbucks to roast more beans instate.

It's still small-beer stuff, and small numbers in terms of jobs. In the early stages of the swing to a knowledge sector economy, you can't jump-start what's not here. You've got to go the Research Triangle route North Carolina pioneered fifty years ago: get knowledge companies to come here and bring their workers with them until we can supply a competitive workforce of our own.

And that's just not gonna happen until we open up to the rest of the world. As long as we have a political culture that thinks Fred and Wilma rode a dinosaur to church, and where you go to church is the first question newcomers get asked, and a $4500 add campaign item brings state government to a halt for three weeks because gay tourists might come here from Britain when a billion dollar budget cut is looming just around the corner, and the latest thing the governor is noted for is playing chicken with the unemployment benefits of his constituents (admittedly, the unrich, uninfluential ones, but still-), well, taking it all in, why would you, as a CEO of a high tech company, want to try and persuade your employees to come to South Carolina?

At the risk of killing their numbers, some of our fave blogs

Waldo's Inner Geek hearts for Donehue, but for all-round Blogability, The Blogland of Earl Capps must take the prize . Capps grinds into local issues in a way, say, Indigo Journal, promised but doesn't yet deliver (early days; with some turnover at the top, they may still be finding their footing). You know where he stands but he retains an engaging sense of curiosity and inquiry about things, and a willingness to rethink an issue that's refreshing in the manichean world of SC blogdom.

Wrapping up the unlamented 2008, he poses an tantalizing line:

Increasingly, political bloggers are building trans-partisan alliances based upon specific issues, as well as other factors such as personalities and non-political interests. As the influence of bloggers rises, it will be interesting to see how these new approaches influence the overall political picture.

If this turns into something, it could be the major blog development of of 2009, and a welcome one for those who imagine The Internets as a way to think anew.

Somwhere, 'Publius' is sharing a laugh with Alexander Hamilton

There was a brief flurry last fall over anonymous blogging, and one of the Big SC Blogs declared anonymity a Very Bad Thing (except, presumably, via its anonymous tip line).  

Now FITS News is adding a feature for anonymous contributors.

19 days...19 days...

On vacation in Texas, President Bush issues a New Year's statement:

"Earlier this year, I promised that I would sprint to the finish of my time as President," Bush said in the statement. "We are working hard to keep that promise. Despite the challenges we face, nothing encourages me more than the character of the American people, whose acts of courage and service sustain our free society and make this the greatest country on Earth."

Um, you know, it's not, you know, serious

The Daily News' Elizabeth Benjamin says talk of Rosie O'Donnell's brother succeeding the she-Clinton is just triangulating a cranky Democratic Party constituency.

Squaring the Vision Thing with the Silver Ring Thing

The Next Right is nothing if not provocative. Posters there are slinging out all kinds of ideas- some good, some bad, some from other planets (Bob Barr's eCampaign Manager unveils his theory of everything, adding, "If John McCain had received the benefit of Ron Paul's mostly unmanaged grassroots operations, designers would currently be competing to see who could design Sarah Palin's inaugural gown") but they are trying hard to rethink the box the Party is in, and find a way out.

Max Borders takes a corporate-retreat view, and starts with the premise that the GOP needs (as George H.W. Bush would say), to recover the Vision Thing , starting with these elements from The Founders:

• Freedom is good for its own sake. (We don’t like tyrants or nannies.)
• Freedom gives rise to prosperity. (It helps us to be prosperous.)
• Freedom can only be guaranteed through limiting government. That may mean “going local” (federalism), checks and balances (constitutional reform), or financial constraints (tax & spending reform). As Madison warned: There are no angels in Washington.
• Freedom must never be auctioned off. (That means must never be sold to special interests, politicians, corporations—even for short term political gain).
• Freedom’s protection and preservation is the sole purpose of government. (Freedom sacrificed to equality (or “crisis management” or “pragmatism” or X) gives us neither.)

Good thoughts, all. workable, even. But how does one square them with the Party's social principles , which, last time we looked, were still in Jerry Falwell's cold, dead hands?