August 2010 – Page 12 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Democratic Officials Lining Up Behind Self-Proclaimed Tea Party Candidates

It looks like suburban Philadelphia Democrats are working hard to ensure that Republicans not only have to overcome the margin of error, but also the margin of fraud. Their first step is lining up self-proclaimed tea party type candidates to funnel off votes from Republican challengers.

I already mentioned the shenanigans in PA-7, and it’s amazing how slimy Democratic candidate Bryan Lentz and the local party leaders are trying to be by claiming that they have nothing to do with the third party candidate. In this age, you can’t hide. Â Here are some of the names and titles of Democratic officials and activists who pushed Jim Schneller over the edge to get on the ballot released by PA2010:

Colleen Guiney is the head of the Swarthmore, PA Democratic Committee.
Joseph Gallagher is a Democratic Committeeman from Aston, PA.
Timothy Willard is a former Lentz staffer who previously worked on his state house campaign.
Nicholas Allred is an officer with the Swarthmore College Democrats – an organization that already backed the Democratic candidate. Â (Election fraud – you can’t get started too early!)
Democratic activists Rocco Polidoro and Arthur Manos signed petitions to get Lentz on the ballot and then turned around to collect signatures for the third party candidate.

Upon further research, PA2010’s editor added this startling fact about the (legal) fraud at work in this self-proclaimed tea party campaign:

With the exception of Schneller himself and one registered Republican, it seems that all of Schnellerâ€™s circulators were registered Democrats, and most of them can be tied to Lentz by far less than Six Degrees of Separation. At least five of those circulators also gathered signatures for Lentz. And as we noted from the beginning, one of them is Colleen Guiney, the volunteer who Lentz once called â€œthe hardest worker on my campaign.â€

I don’t know how Lentz’s campaign and the Democratic officials can keep a straight face while they issue denial after denial.

It’s worth noting that local tea party groups have asked Schneller to leave the race, and they are making clear that they in no way support his candidacy.

The Independence Hall Tea Party Association, the largest such group in the region, endorsed Meehan in the spring and asked Schneller last year to quit the race, said Teri Adams, a board member of the group’s political action committee. …

The Independence Hall group and the Delaware County Patriots sent Schneller a letter Wednesday asking him again to drop out of the race, or at least to withdraw the signatures that Lentz volunteers and supporters had gathered.

In the meantime, we’re dealing with it here in PA-8, too. Here are the (so far) announced names of Democratic officials pushing a candidate who attended a Tea Party Forum in January only to tell attendees that they suck for attending and suck for voting.

Brian Caplan now works for the state Democratic Party and is a former staffer for Democratic candidate Patrick Murphy.
Jessica Milinichik also now reportedly works for the state party, but she was with the Murphy campaign as recently as a few weeks ago.

The third party candidate is expected to pull voters away from the Republican candidate, though the Democrats, again, deny any involvement. Â Unfortunately, our local tea party group hasn’t issued any statements about this kooky candidate, even though he got up and insulted them at their own event. Â Hopefully, they will make it clear to their supporters that they aren’t backing his candidacy.

I had my first experience with dirty politics from Philadelphia-area Democrats in 2008 when MoveOn volunteers canvassed our neighborhood and destroyed all of the GOP signs they recognized. Â Not only were the McCain signs in our yards cut, but the frames were pulled out of our lawns and bent beyond easy repair. Â Fortunately for me, I had a stash of extra frames from another campaign that didn’t need as much help, so I set out to repair the ones on our block. Â I expect the same kind of shenanigans this year.

I’m not opposed to third party candidates, but I am opposed to those who accept help from one party just to screw over another candidate when they have no intention of running a real campaign.

E-Mail Issues

My e-mail is currently not working, because the server it runs on is being moved from my friend J’s old house to his new house. That means I haven’t gotten my Google Alerts for this morning, which is why blogging is scarce. To top that off, thanks to the iPad, I left my Macbook in its bag all weekend, so all the crap I wanted to blog about is on that, and I can’t get it to the Macbook because of the e-mail issue. I can blog from the iPad without too much pain, but I do most of my work during the day from a laptop, and switching back and forth is a productivity killer.

Maybe it’s time to look into MobileMe or something like that. I definitely need a way to be able to save open tabs on one device, and open them on another. Currently if I find something on the mobile devices, I e-mail it to myself so I can open up on my laptop. To top all that off, I also have a Mac Pro that I cobbled together from parts running in my office now (mostly for X-Plane). So that’s three computers I’m regularly working on.

Can anyone recommend good practices for keeping my life synced between a desktop Mac, a laptop Mac, and an iPad?

The Other Side of the Thin Blue Line

We see regularly on the blogosphere the police getting away with all manner of abuse, in terms of arresting quiet suburban couples who were mistaken for pot growing kingpins, or something like that, but there is also plenty of “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity” out there, and Wyatt’s true detective files are among those:

The officers bring everything up and tell us what happened. To a man, we say,Â â€œYou canâ€™t lock this guy up for this.â€ The officers reply that their sergeant told them to lock the man up. Naturally, we asked the officers if the sergeant was coming up here to explain why he did that, the officers replied no. Of course not, because the sergeant knows he was wrong.

Look, in the real world, yeah, this toad probably broke into the vehicle. In the legal world, however, nothing this person did can justify charging him with the theft. Not without a complainant, a witness, or some physical evidence. In the end, we had the toad identified, checked him for active warrants, then released him with no charges.

And because this idiot sergeant ordered his arrest, the toad could have a nice little lawsuit on his hands if he so desired. Only in Philadelphia.

There are plenty of cops out there trying to do the right thing in a world that is decidedly not clearly black or white. I don’t mean to trivialize true abuses of police powers, but quite often the line between the good and the evil is a thin line. That’s something that’s probably lost in this debate.

Top Shot: Eliminated

Its there’s one person I’ve been pulling for in the Top Shot series, since fellow blogger Caleb was eliminated, it’s been Kelly Bachand. He’s very well rounded and a natural shooter, and just seemed to be like the kind of guy who could unexpectedly prevail. But this week, after sending yet another competitor home, he got to go first.

It turns out in this challenge, going first was the last thing anyone wanted to. I thought Kelly was setting the standard with a minute and a half, but that’s what got him eliminated, along with along with Adam. When you’re the last two people sitting on the bench, the last thing you want is to be betting on J.J. Racaza making a mistake. That didn’t happen. Tough breaks for Kelly and Adam, but that’s the way the bullet cuts the fuse I guess.

The Stupid

It continuously amazes me how poor executive culture can sometimes be in large companies. My industry is full of it, and unfortunately has much farther to fall before a new generation can come along and start picking up the pieces. Clayton is speaking of an HP policy that doesn’t allow laid off workers to be rehired:

The reason was that Hurd found out that some divisions were laying off workers–then rehiring them a few months later, when they discovered, “Gee, no one else but Fred knows how this works!”Â His solution, rather than asking if perhaps he was pushing too hard to get costs down–was to adopt this absurd rule.

HP is busily hiring people at the moment for positions that I could easily do, and for considerably better pay than I now get.Â But Hurd’s stupid, peevish rule means this valley is filled with qualified engineers that can’t be hired back.Â Instead, HP has to hire people from elsewhere.Â Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Unintended consequences aren’t just for stupid government bureaucrats. CorporateÂ bureaucraciesÂ are no less infested with the same diseases. There is a tendency in Corporate America to still believe we’re in an economy ofÂ interchangeableÂ labor. This thinking is a relic of the industrial age. The vast majority of a corporations value is increasingly coming from intellectual capital, i.e. it’s people. There are certainly times when layoffs are necessary, and I wouldn’t argue that empire building isn’t a pervasive problem (as it’s been even in small places I’ve worked), but policies that don’t center around hiring the best people for the job are doomed to failure.

Contradictions

One of Joe’s cartoons got me thinking. Our opponents say we need special rules for guns in urban areas, because what works inÂ CheyenneÂ doesn’t necessarily work in Chicago, or something like that (because everyone knows Cheyenne isn’t a real city, like the ones wealthy lefties live in). But yet when we pushed to get some very large tracts of rural areas opened up for firearms possession, we’re mocked, told we’ll shoot people, and invading their quiet sanctuaries with our gun nuttery. If our strategy is any gun, anywhere, any time, as our opponents suggest we’re struggling for, they are at least guilty of no gun, nowhere, none of the time.

Newest Additions to Righthaven Suits

Clayton is reporting they are suing the Second Amendment Sisters now too.

A Solution to the UK Crime Problem

Now, just like Mexico, they can blame it all on weak gun laws in America.

7th Circuit Ruling on Felons

Yet another court has hinted that non-violent felons may be able to retain their Second Amendment rights. The Court ruled that as applied to Williams, who was a violent felon, was not unconstitutional, but said a non-violent felon might be able to prevail on 922(g)(1) being overly broad. What’s interesting to me is that Justice O’Conner was sitting on this panel by designation, and signed on to the unanimous opinion. It’s long been believed that O’Conner would have been a “no” vote on Heller had she not been replaced by Justice Alito upon her retirement from the Court. Her concurrence here is interesting, but offers little insight into how she would have voted on Heller, I think.

If you had told me …

… back in November of 2008 that in August of 2010, the head of the Brady Center would be upset with President Obama for parroting an NRA line of “better enforcement” I would have said you were nuts, but this is a strange world we live in. Things must be pretty gloomy at Brady HQ these days.

I will make a prediction that will cheer them up. Hillary is going to primary Barry in 2012. After the 2010 elections, she’ll be one of the first off this RMS Titanic of anÂ Administration. She’ll write a book preaching about howÂ incompetentÂ this Administration has been, and sell herself as the savior of modern progressivism. She might even return the Brady’s phone calls. I’m pretty convinced if the GOP takes back the House, she’s going to set herself up to unseat Barry in the 2012 primary.