Foundation

Suns lose to Clippers, fall behind Lakers and Spurs with 12 losses.

Of course, the Lakers have a stretch coming up against top teams, and won’t have Andrew Bynum, so Phoenix may get the Pacific Division back by default.

The Lakers are now the #1 seed in the West. Bynum’s going to be out a while with a sprained knee, but without him the Lakers won in overtime in Seattle while the Suns were idle. So both teams have 26-11 records, but the Lakers have the tiebreaker so it’s Lakers/Suns/Spurs/Blazers/Mavericks/Hornets right now.

#1. Best record in the West. Take that all the fools who said to trade Kobe.

Original link via Ace of Spades HQ…

For the last eight years, the Democratic left has claimed that voting machines are the tools of electoral fraud in America. They claimed that the efficiency that makes them useful also makes them unreliable. However, a lack of efficiency also has a cost, unfortunately a personal one.

On primary night in Sutton, New Hampshire, they used no voting machines. Everything was done by hand. Vote totals were read aloud and written down by hand onto the form sent to the state officials, and in that process a mistake was made. Ron Paul’s 31 votes were missed, with his line on the form left blank entirely.

The mistake was corrected the next day in an updated fax, when a polite voter asked why his vote for Ron Paul did not register in the official tally, but that was too late to prevent problems for poor Jennifer Call, Sutton’s town clerk. She became the target of a nationwide intimidation effort, as deranged Ron Paul supporters across the country accused her of numerous crimes including treason and fraud.

Calling her at work and at home, calling her primarily from out of state, harassing her, accusing her, threatening her, and using false identities at times, the Ron Paul Revolution turned this woman’s life into a nightmare. Says the Concord Monitor:

She went home and locked her doors. She called her mother in North Carolina. She cried. The calls kept coming. She unhooked her answering machine and requested an unlisted number.

“I was drained emotionally and physically,” Call said. “That’s when I really started to freak out. Thursday it hit me, that most of these people are not rational. That’s when I became scared.”

Some say the Republican Party needs to reach out to these people, because we may not draw them into the fold if we reject Ron Paul too strongly. I hope they’re right; I hope these people never identify Republican a day in their lives. Let their Nazi brownshirt tactics of intimidation stay put, outside of the legitimacy of a peaceful, national party.

Yesterday my ballot came in the mail for California’s primary election on Super Tuesday, February 5.

Unlike the November 2006 ballot which was just huge, this one is pretty small. One office, and 7 initiatives (well, effectively four since four of them are nearly identical).

Here are my choices and recommendations from top to bottom, and why:

President: Fred Thompson. I think he’s the candidate who best can heal the fractures starting to come up in our party, and is the candidate who can best get us on the Golden Path that Ronald Reagan set out for us.

Proposition 91: No. Prop. 91 would restrict gas taxes from being used for anything but roads and other special transportation uses. Our budget simply cannot handle any more such special restrictions though, as the ones already in effect (like the school mandate) already contribute to our perennial budget crises.

Proposition 92: No. We don’t need to subsidize community colleges even more than we already do, sorry, and that’s exactly what capping unit costs would amount to us doing.

Proposition 93: No. I oppose term limits, but Prop. 93 doesn’t end them. It merely reduces the musical-chairs effect of the existing term limits, and grants a reset on term limits for those already in office. That’s dishonest and reason enough to vote against this as it is.

Proposition 94: No. Governor Schwarzenegger has negotiated a change to the gambling compact with the Pechanga indians. He wants to let them increase their government monopoly on gambling, and split the profits with them to help cover for his out of control spending. It’s better than tax and spend, but I don’t want to encourage spending.

Proposition 95: No. See 94, only for the Morongos.

Proposition 96: No. See 94, only for the Sycuans.

Proposition 97: No. See 94, only for the Agua Calientes.

Lakers win, Mavericks win. Mavericks take #1 by tiebreaker vs Suns, and Lakers pull within a half game. I just hope the Lakers can hang on next road trip, heh.

Eric Egland has some more competition now that John Doolittle is officially out of the running for re-election. Former State Senator Rico Oller is running for the nomination, and former Representative Doug Ose is considering it.

Can the political novice and war veteran stand up to these political veterans? I hope so, but this race sounds a whole lot tougher now.

It’s official: Governor Schwarzenegger wants to release 22,000 prison inmates early in order to try to balance the budget more easily. He’s now the Girly Man on crime. It’s a good thing he can’t run for President, because this is surely going to be a Willie Horton moment for him. Out of those 22,000 supposedly low-risk criminals, surely at least one is going to defy that classification.

After losses by the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs tonight, the Western Conference of the NBA just heated up:

It’s quite a logjam when the top four teams in the conference all have 11 losses, and it gets complicated when those four teams are in two of the conference’s three divisions, because the division leaders are guaranteed to have three of the top four seeds. Home court advantage is determined by record still, to prevent teams having an incentive to lose games, but a weak division’s leader getting that fourth seed does get the benefit of playing a weaker team than it otherwise would.

Spurs fans must be particularly unhappy though, because they’ve dropped from #1 to #5 rather rapidly, skipping over #3 because the Lakers hold the tiebreaker due to a win when Tim Duncan and Tony Parker were injured, and #4 because of the weak but division leading Blazers having that spot guaranteed.

Exciting times are head, oh yes indeed.

Roll Call reports that Representative John Doolittle of California’s District 4 will announce today that he will not seek re-election to a tenth term. He has scheduled a press conference at 10:30am (in two hours) for this purpose.

This is great news. Between an FBI investigation (and raid) from his Jack Abramoff connection, the fact that RedState-endorsed challenger Eric Egland was out-raising him money, and that he was poised to lose in a Bush +24, Schwarzenegger +50 district, it was time to him to go.

What a bad day for Charlie Brown, the Democratic challenger, but a good day for Republicans. Doolittle definitely out of the race should put this district out of reach of Democratic hopes.

The Lakers go to New Orleans and re-take the #5 seed for home court (since the Blazers lead a very weak division to get guaranteed #4). What a great road trip.