Foundation

At our next Republican Convention here in California, the most important vote we take may be the vote to close our primary elections, ensuring that people are Republicans before they can choose who will represent our party on the ballot. Since 1999 when we opened our primaries to those who do not join a party, we have had no noteworthy statewide electoral success from primary-nominated Republicans (our dear Governor Schwarzenegger, remember, bypassed the primary process in the recall of Governor Gray Davis).

So the benefits of the open primary have been shown to be minimal. Yet a certain coalition of Republicans will be fighting hard to keep our primaries open. Notable in that coalition are the backers of Meg “I’m a huge fan of Van Jones” Whitman, candidate for Governor; Carly “The fundamental objective [of HP is] to be a good international citizen” Fiorina, candidate for Senate; and of course Governor Arnold “Right-wing crazies” Schwarzenegger. See a pattern?

This is what I’ve been saying all along about the Chuck DeVore/Carly Fiorina primary race for Senate. This is about more than who’s going to be the sacrifice on the ballot this time around. This is about what our party will stand for, and who will get to claim the mantle of speaking for the party the next time our legislative conservatives obstruct Democrat tax hikes.

And I’m perfectly willing to concede our two US Senate seats and Governor’s chair in exchange for strong Assembly and state Senate caucuses, as well as strong conservatives in the US House, free of undermining influences from said Senate nominees and Governor’s offices. We’re not going to win the statewide offices anyway, because if push came to shove the unions and their allies would start running ads with as many lies as it took to win, or to raise the money it took to run those ads, just as the pro-abort forces did to beat back Parental Notification last year.

Just look at the record: We did no better containing spending under Schwarzenegger than under Davis*, this despite his big talk on taxes and spending. As usual, the squish on social policy turned out to be a squish on fiscal policy as well, failing to use the line-item veto to bring the budget under control, instead letting the spending grow until it became a crisis, and then supporting tax hikes and accounting shell games to pretend to fix the crisis.

Outside of the obscure technical offices like Secretary of State or Insurance Commissioner, or the recall fluke which bypassed the base**, with or without Independents in our primaries we haven’t been able to do anything statewide since we ran hard on illegal immigration in 1994. And of course once we did that, President Clinton triangulated on us with Operation Gatekeeper. He did so with urgency in order to keep our precious Electoral votes off the table in 1996. Note that since his goal was only to help California, and more specifically to help himself in California, he did nothing to help Arizona. In fact he just sent a lot of our runoff their way, which is why they followed our path and were a major state in the Minuteman movement a decade later.

And yes, Governor Girly Man has been wide open about his express aims to change the rules to crush conservatives, whom he once termed as “right-wing crazies” and, in the context of impeachment, “an embarassment.” That’s why he supported a plan to change the way districts are drawn in the state, selling Proposition 11 as a way to kick out conservatives who wouldn’t budge on taxes, accomplishing this by spreading us conservative voters to prevent us from controlling any districts. But even that’s not enough to satisfy his hunger to purge us from the party, because now he wants to ensure that we Republicans don’t even control our own primaries.

So sure, I understand why outsiders may want us in California to nominate the ambiguous-on-life Fiorina*** in order to try to kick out the Senate’s dumbest member, but we who live here have more at stake. We don’t want our party to become useless instead of just weak. We also want our party to represent its members, and so must close our primaries to all but our own members. Joining the party is a fast and easy process; why not encourage Californians to join it to vote in a heated primary? Let’s get more people identifying as Republican instead of just dipping a toe into our pool, then pulling it back out later.

The author is a lifelong California Resident, a new media and online consultant for hire, and can be found on Twitter.

* According to the Department of Finance, General Fund spending went up from $57.8 billion (1998-1999; Wilson’s last Budget) to $78.3 billion (2002-2003; Davis’s last budget) under Gray Davis, an increase of 35.5%. The budget then grew from that $78.3 billion to $103.0 billion (2007-2008; the last pre-recession budget) under Arnold Schwarzenegger, an increase of 33.0%. Only the Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget forced him to end the good times for government unions. He would never have done so on his own without the recession slashing tax revenues.

** It’s clear to me, from the results of the Recall election, that if not for the Recall in 2003 it would have been McClintock v. Davis in 2006, because the base Republicans backed McClintock while the center-left backed Schwarzenegger, but the latter doesn’t generally vote in our primaries. It also would have been Bustamante as the frontrunner this time but he went and backstabbed the whole state party and struck out on his own in the Recall, only to get slapped down. Now Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, Ronald Reagan’s successor, is probably going to get another shot.

*** We all know that’s what people mean when they call her electable. She calls herself personally pro-life (like John Kerry), but never elaborates. That’s all anybody means when they call a Republican electable in a Democrat-leaning state: squishy on the issues. And abortion is the king of issues in this state. You won’t be able to turn on a television or radio without seeing or hearing Barbara Boxer saying “woman’s right to choose” no matter whom we nominate next year, and especially if we’re dealing with a Supreme Court vacancy in the summer of 2010.

The excitement this morning on Twitter seems all about Mike Huckabee. There has been no doubt in my mind that he never stopped running for President after conceding the nomination to John McCain last year. He just changed which Presidential election he was running in.

Which is why it was such a huge (but very silly, given the timing) argument late last year over who “came in second” in the primary race, and by proxy who the early 2012 “frontrunner” was going to be. Mitt Romney had a dedicated core of supporters fighting for him, and so did Huckabee. Some of them on each side just wouldn’t give up, while the rest of us just got back to work.

It appears that Mike Huckabee himself got back to work as well. Gone is the religious demagoguery from the campaign, as are the left-wing economic ideas he was pushing. Instead we have a man who’s fighting the embattled Barack Obama on his reckless spending and disastrous foreign policy, and the Democrats apparently are scared by it. In 2008 the Democrats loved him, but in 2009 they hate him. That in itself is a change that speaks well of Huckabee’s future hopes.

Republicans are creatures of habit. We tend to like seeing the same batches of people in one primary after another, and eventually the stable, persistent men get their shot. Even John McCain got his. But if Mike Huckabee wants to try for his, there is one more thing he needs to do: Help us take back the House.

As of a month ago, his PAC raised over $300,000. That money needs to get out to Repubican challengers nationwide, with less of a Southern bias than he now shows. Democrats took the House by challenging everywhere, and so will we. Reports are that Huckabee plans to back 50 candidates with his PAC. I hope he does, and I hope he funnels substantial amounts of money to each both through the PAC, and through direct (and free) fundraising stops.

If Mike Huckabee can be a rainmaker for Republicans who take back the House, then yes, Huckabee becomes a leading man in the Republican party and will be excellently positioned to run again in 2012. By proving he could raise money and be a genuine party leader, he will have earned it.

That is the missing piece for Mike Huckabee, and I truly hope he fits it into place.

Camino almost got me tonight. I heard on Twitter that a NoScript substitute existed for Camino, and I’d heard long ago that it had a Greasemonkey substitute.

So, I tried it. Step one was getting my cookies, cookie preferences, and bookmarks out of Firefox. They all imported flawlessly into the Camino 2 beta. That was great.

Turns out between Camino’s own flash blocking, and the CamiNoScript javascript blocking, I was going to be fine JS-wise. That was great.

Sadly though, GeekMonkey is no GreaseMonkey substitute. Geekmonkey is a ‘bookmarklet’ that turns UserScripts into ‘bookmarklets.’ So for a script to run on a page, you must click. Click for every page you load, for every script you want run. That was unnacceptable.

So, back to Firefox…

Updated at the bottom.

We all already knew that if Carly Fiorina were to win the Republican nomination to challenge Senator Barbara Boxer next year, that Boxer would use Fiorina’s record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard against us. Many people still curse Fiorina for how she led the firm, and many of those people live in parts of the state we’d like to win in order to win a statewide election.

So it’s not entirely surprising that Chuck DeVore is already attempting to use HP against Fiorina. As the San Jose Mercury-News reports, DeVore alleges that HP began circumventing US export restrictions under Fiorina’s leadership, sending technology to Iran illegally through a third party, the Redington Gulf company.

If it’s true it needs to come out now, during the primary, so that it doesn’t hurt us in the general. If it’s false it needs to be refuted now, during the primary, so that it’s old news in case Boxer and the California Democrats attempt to use it in the general.

Fiorina already has a reputation with fans (yes, fans) of HP. There are people who loved its computers, its printers, its calculators, or it other products. For the people who loved the computers, the Compaq merger had an emotional impact. The people who hate (yes, hate) Fiorina because of her time at HP may be pre-disposed to believe she committed criminal acts at the company, and if she wants to be our nominee, she should clear this up as soon as possible.

Update: I am informed by a DeVore-linked source that Chuck DeVore was not pushing this story to the press, but rather he was asked for a quote to be included in a story that was already being written.

Controlling my PS3 from the elliptical using my PSP is almost the best thing ever. Unfortunately I can’t play Makai Kingdom that way (or anything past the Playstation level of game, apparently), so it fails to achieve that level.

I can play my PS versions of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, though. Wait a minute, I must test an idea I just had.

…No, Mega Man Anniversary Collection isn’t compatible, despite having no need for the analog sticks. Ditto La Pucelle. But Final Fantasy Tactics would surely work. I may get desperate enough to play that again, ugh. Fortunately I downloaded Patapon 2 tonight, so between Patapon 2 and Pangya I should be safe for now.

This game came with my PSP, but it didn’t interest me. I tried it naturally since I paid for it, but I wasn’t hooked. Maybe if it included Lydia/Rydia from IV and/or Krile from V I would have been. But no, so no, I’ve given the UMD to my brother.

In 1952, during the Korean War, the United Steel Workers of America had gone out on strike. The union was demanding pay increases beyond what steel firms said they could afford to pay, unless they were to raise prices beyond what would be approved by the government’s Wage Stablization Board (set up for the war to attempt to keep costs in line despite inflationary government policies).

President Harry Truman, Democrat, unilaterally declared the steel firms to be at fault for the strikes, which were set to cripple Defense contractors’ ability to keep the war supplied. So, the President nationalized America’s steel manufacturing plants with the plan of dictating his own terms to the unions, appeasing them as part of his political base, while keeping afloat an early front of the Cold War.

The Supreme Court two months later shut the President down, denying the administration’s claim that he had broad implied or residual powers to do whatever he wanted as President of the United States. Had he relied on the Selective Service Act to take control, he might have gotten away with it, but he refused to use it because it had too many pesky controls to protect property rights. Had he relied on Taft-Hartley to stop the strikes, he might have gotten away with it, but he refused to use it because the unions were his allies.

So today, it is surely with the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube co. vs Sawyer in mind that the Congress debates giving President Barack Obama, Democrat, sweeping authority over Internet Service Providers, including the authority to nationalize whatever Internet resources he declares to be important.

S. 773, a bill by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat, has a 55-page draft bill that would create new “emergency” powers for the President, a ‘cybersecurity’ Enabling Act of sorts, that would give the President the authority broad powers over any “non-governmental” computer networks, whether public or private, that are declared by the President to be “critical.”

On its own, this power is already dangerous, and even frightening to anyone in the industry. Whether large or small, we all who operate on the Internet invest in online capital. Large firms spend billions on the task, and now the Democrats want to nationalize it at the drop of a hat. This is threatened theft on a scale not usually seen outside banana Republics.

These powers extend beyond declared emergencies, however. Rockefeller’s bill would immediately grant the ability of the government to control hiring and firing of jobs related to these so-called critical networks, because the President could unilaterally declare that jobs related to those networks would be required to be filled by people certified to the task by the government. And much like with the car dealerships, the Obama administration is fully expected to use its power to favor political allies for these jobs by granting or denying certification depending on your level of donations to Obama for America or the Democratic National Committee.

Elections have consequences, and all those people who told themselves that Democrats would leave the Internet alone now have a lesson to learn regarding letting the scorpion of big government onto their backs. But it is not too late, and we all now can unite against the socialist threat now looming over the Internet.

The author is a contributing editor at RedState.com and a new media consultant available for hire. He can also be found on Twitter.

Pitchers’ wins aren’t a very useful statistic, so paying over $15 million per win is not advisable.

This is what happens when you bring people over from the Giants.

I couldn’t find a new game to play on the elliptical with the DS. Etrian Odyssey and SimCity require too much stylus precision at times and get annoying. Populous and Civilization I’ve played out. Of other games I have, Picross and Geometry Wars fail on stylus precision, and Pokemon Pearl fails on being played out. Etrian Odyssey fails because I haven’t finished the first yet.

I’m also not sure if I can always play Etrian Odyssey for an hour, much like several of the GBA and GB games I have like Paperboy, Tetris, Gradius Galaxies, Gauntlet, or Joust.

I can’t find anything at my local stores or on major online retailers that I want, either. So, today I bought a PSP and Pangya Fantasy Golf. That’ll keep me playing a while, and when that’s done I have a number of choices to buy such as there makes of the early Star Oceans, RPGs by Atlus or Nippon Ichi, and apparently the Persona games are coming. I know little of them but they sounded interesting. Disgaea is even an option for crying out loud.

At an hour a day I could play that on the elliptical for over 6 months.Those sounded interesting.

I’d never have bought a PSP for its own sake. But to keep exercising, it’s worth the money.

Or: History Repeats

Updated at the bottom.

Attention leftists: hypocrisy is not a failure to live up to one’s own ideals. Hypocrisy is a willful professing of a belief, that one that does not truly believe. An outspoken Christian who commits adultery is not a hypocrite. An outspoken atheist who prays is a hypocrite. In today’s extended lesson Google must either accept that it is undermining the Internet, or be a hypocrite.

Exhibit A: Google supports ‘net neutrality’, a movement which began as an argument against ISPs selectively filtering traffic, which is a legitimate fear in the face of cable and phone companies trying for a “triple play” of television, phone, and Internet service. The idea is that if a Comcast or an AT&T degrade or prohibit the use of other firms’ phone and video services, then you will be forced to use their own. Google, the firm, professes to believe in opposing this tactic.

Exhibit B: Google is set to argue against Apple’s blocking of Google Voice from iPhones to the FCC. This is the Net Neutrality prediction in action. Apple conspires with AT&T to block the use of a third party’s phone service over AT&T’s Internet connection. Google, again, supports this belief in neutrality.

Exhibit C: Google blocks Skype from Android-based phones. This is anti-Net Neutrality in action. Google conspires with providers to block the use of a third party’s phone service over the provider’s data connection.

On the other hand, it gets worse for Google. In its defense, Google claims that T-Mobile didn’t request the block. That would work, except that it could only mean Google is attempting to fight the market advantage of Skype by blocking that competitor and bundling Google Voice with Android. In its attempt to avoid the Net Neutrality hypocrisy and FCC attention for its actions (which “do not stand up to scrutiny,” which is what Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf said of all justifications for anti-Net Neutrality), Google confesses to doing what Microsoft was accused by the FTC of doing with its Internet Explorer and Windows releases against Netscape Navigator.

Steve Ballmer is laughing. So am I, only I’m laughing at all the people who pretend Google is anything friendly to ordinary Americans.

Update: Google has issued a rebuttal of the piece I linked to above, but they do not rebut my key point, which is that Google stands ready and willing to collaborate fully with anti-Net Netural policies of their business partners, even as they run to the State like good little fascists if their competitors try the same policies. They key quote is that “individual operators can request that certain applications be filtered if they violate their terms of service,” and in fact the T-Mobile terms of service are not net neutral, banning any uses not ‘explicitly permitted by your Data Plan,’ instead requiring you to use T-Mobile provided media options. Additionally, T-Mobile Germany has already banned Skype on the iPhone. So, of course T-Mobile USA is going to make the same ban, and according to Google’s own words, they will be complicit in that ban.