RS Gathering 2011: Adam Hasner (R CAND, FL-SEN PRIMARY).

Adam Hasner was one of our speakers at the RedState Gathering, and he was available for a few moments for comments.  You may recognize the backdrop; it’s from the Teddy Roosevelt painting, and I’d like to note that I think that campaigns looking for nice backgrounds from which to do their videos could do worse than use Steve Penley’s stuff.

Adam’s site is here.  I liked talking with him; nice guy.  The phony-moderate Democratic Senator named Nelson that Adam’s running against is Bill, by the way: Ben Nelson’s the phony-moderate Democratic Senator from Nebraska.  Keeping track of which one is which is an annoyance; but with any luck and a good bit of work, it’s an annoyance that will abruptly end, starting January 2013…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh Constant Reader BigGator5 puts money where mouth is…

…by running for office.  Specifically, he’s running for Supervisor of Elections for Lake County, Florida – which is, of course, one of the kinds of jobs that we always need candidates for, and we always will.  No election or donation site yet, but BG5 is of course a long-time reader both here and at RedState, so I’m sure that he’ll let us know when that changes.

Obviously, I wish him luck and success, and I look forward to hearing from him (and anybody else doing the same thing) about what it’s like to run for office on the county level.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, the GOP and conservatism in general needs more like this; people who will run for offices.  We can’t win if we can’t show up.  I’m not saying that people are bad people for not doing that – after all, I’m not running for anything right now, either – but if you have the time and the inclination, tossing your hat in the ring would be a mitzvah.

We shall have Alan Grayson to kick around some more.

The fellow is planning to run for Congress again.  Alan Grayson is, of course, the frothing lunatic who was elected to FL-08 in 2008… and then promptly lost his first re-election in 2010, mostly because he was, well, a frothing lunatic who called his opponent (one Daniel Webster*) a member of the Taliban and made up stuff about Webster at a level not usually seen outside of a special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode about corrupt politicians… assuming such an episode was ever made.  And I kind of hope that one was; Grayson was and is certainly oily enough to be a live-action cartoon villain.

Mind you, Grayson may not be actually in FL-08 when this is over – or Rep. Webster may not be, for that matter.  The Florida legislature is in the process of redistricting the state to reflect their picking up two seats in Congress, and they’re not really keen about outsiders interfering in the process.  This is partially due to state legislators’ fairly standard reluctance to not let what will already be a fraught situation be made worse by rampaging incumbents; but it’s also partially due to the so-called “Fair Districtsconstitutional amendments that passed last year.  Those amendments were designed to reform the redistricting process, and in the long run they may even actually do that.  But in the short run they promise to touch off what could be an epic battle in the courts over whether said amendments should take precedence over the racial gerrymandering guidelines set up by the Voting Rights Act.

Continue reading We shall have Alan Grayson to kick around some more.

Charlie Crist, ambulance chaser.

I know that sometimes, people wonder if the things that they do for the Right, or the Republican party, really make a difference.  To that I say: why not ask Charlie Crist?

From Florida Governor and presumptive Senator, to ambulance-chasing lawyer ready to serve you.  I don’t know about you, but I’m going to put this one up on the wall.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

[UPDATE]: Here’s the blogger that it was originally from.  Suggestion for folks doing video captures: try to attach your website to the end of these things.  Makes it easier to trace the original source.

#rsrh QotD, Too-Public Pragmatist? edition.

Not that I intend to get sucked into the FL-SEN primary quite just yet, but this line from Ace about Florida primary candidate Adam Hasner made me laugh out loud:

I am completely against choosing political candidates based on irrational, tribalistic ethnic appeal, in all circumstances and based upon sacred principle.

Unless it works in our favor. In which case… okay.

Particularly since normally we’d be talking about going a little bit incremental, given that it’s a Democratic-held seat and all that.  But that’s the thing about getting a couple of wins; it makes you hungry for more.

Moe Lane

Florida Democrats astroturf GOP town halls!

…and don’t do a very good job of it, really. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Daniel Webster got heckled by “members of progressive groups such as Moveon.org and Organize Now,” while Allen West got screamed at by a woman later identified as being a former radio host for Air America (remember them*?).  A few things to note about this:

  • When the newspapers are taking the time to note that hecklers are professional activists, then the activists are officially Doing It Wrong.
  • And the reason why the activists are officially Doing It Wrong is because the goal of the exercise is to upset and dismay the legislator that you’re trying to target.  During the health care town hall meltdown, what one took away from it was the way that Democratic legislators ran and hid from their own constituents.  Politicians who didn’t – like, dagnabbit, Barney Frank – generally came out of the situation with little trouble.
  • And in fact neither Webster nor West were particularly upset nor dismayed at the reaction.  Webster kept patiently explaining his votes and calmly engaging the screamers.  West bluntly told his screamers that they weren’t going to intimidate him.

Continue reading Florida Democrats astroturf GOP town halls!

#rsrh Run, Grayson! Run!

Only… don’t run for the House, OK?  Your talents would be wasted in the House.  Senate!  You want to run for Florida Senate!  Sure, there’s a sitting Democrat there right now, but your allies among the netroots would line up to throw money at your candidacy against Bill Nelson*.  It would be a glorious sight.  GLORIOUS!

I won’t beg – I suspect that you enjoy that sort of thing far too much – but I will say this.  This is your destiny.

Your destiny.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

*Admittedly, about a quarter of them would be throwing money at you because they thought that they were throwing money at a primary challenge to Ben Nelson of Nebraska, another quarter of them would contribute thinking that they were funding a primary challenge to Ben Nelson in Florida, and a third quarter of them would donate because they thought that you were running in the Nebraska primary against Bill Nelson – but, hey!  The money doesn’t decrease in value just because it used to be held by idiots, am I right?

Union Reform bills pass in Ohio, Indiana Houses.

In Ohio, the final vote on SB 5 was 53-44; it’s already passed the Ohio Senate, but changes made to the bill require another quick vote on the legislation either today or tomorrow. This particular legislation goes a bit farther than the groundbreaking Wisconsin union reform bill; it redefines collective bargaining privileges for public sector union employees to cover wages only, institutes merit pay for public sector union workers, and makes strikes by public sector employees illegal. Most interestingly, it extends collective bargaining reforms to police and firefighter unions, which is quite possibly a reaction to the rather contemptible activities and passive-aggressive threats done and made by Big Labor in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, in Indiana the final vote on HB 1216 was 54-44: this reform bill will raise the threshold for union payscales for public work projects from $150,000 to $350,000, and will also no longer require non-union companies to guarantee union jobs on projects in order to bid on them. Entertainingly, this was one of the ostensible reasons that Indiana state representatives hid in Illinois for a month. Short version: it did not end well.

And, of course, a few days ago the Florida state House passed HB 1021, which bans the automatic collection of public sector union dues. Slowly but surely, reform is coming to help embattled states fight the entrenched partisan interests strangling trade and wealth generation from within…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh Ron Klein (D, Nothing in particular) cuts and runs.

The DCCC was kind of hoping for a different answer, here:

Former Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) said Wednesday he is not going to run next year for the seat he lost to Rep. Allen West (R) in November, despite entreaties from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In remarks at a Pompano Beach political event, Klein said DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) asked him to run again.

Rep. Israel is having a bad cycle generally, and it’s only March of 2011: as Jim Geraghty and the NRCC cheerfully noted, the available pool of targeted seats has gone from 61 to 37 to 14 to 13.  And in a Presidential cycle, too…

Via The Other McCain.

Moe Lane

Union dues reform bill passes Florida House.

The bill in question is HB 1021, and it is designed to get government out of union’s business by: banning automatic dues collection for public sector unions; and requiring union leadership to get permission from individual members before using those dues for partisan politicking.  The bill passed 74-40, despite the rather strenuous objections of Big Labor: a similar bill (SB 830) is making its way through the Florida Senate.  The success of HB 1021 should help with the success of SB 830, which has been fought every step of the way, naturally; the Democratic-Big Labor governmental alliance has zero interest in seeing their profitable feedback cycle disrupted by the ability of mere workers to decide whether they like having their money go to keep one party in office.

Should the bill make it to the state Senate floor, it should pass relatively easily – both branches of the Florida legislature are solidly Republican.  In fact, they were like that before the last legislative elections… and that detail is something that I’d like to highlight, because it’s important.  Given that Florida is in fact a Right-to-Work state already, it may seem surprising that union reform is progressing even further in that state.  Well, there may be a reason for it, and that reason may be Wisconsin: specifically, the puerile, undemocratic, hooliganish, contemptuous, and generally infantile way that Democrats/Big Labor attempted to avoid dealing with the simple notion that elections have consequences.  The Left’s cheerleaders are currently ‘bragging’ – scare quotes because I’m not sure why anybody would be proud of the fact that they’re being vocal defenders of a political party’s deniable corruption slush fund – that their shrill, petulant extended whine against labor union reform in Wisconsin galvanized the Left nationwide.  That may or may not be true, but I can tell you one thing: it definitely galvanized the Right.

And, hey! – We control more state legislatures than you do!

Moe Lane (crosspost)