Politics: January 2010 Archives

If you were paying attention to world news in 1980 and 1981, you know of Lech Wałęsa, the man who turned an illegal independent trade union into a force for freedom in communist Poland. Although his efforts directly resulted in his imprisonment and the imposition of martial law, in 1988 he and his allies pushed the communist government into allowing semi-free parliamentary elections, and by the following year, Poland had its first non-Communist prime minister since before World War II. He served a five-year term as President of Poland from 1990-1995.

This past week, Wałęsa came to Chicago to campaign on behalf of Adam Andrzejewski, a Republican candidate for Governor of Illinois. This eight-minute video features excerpts from his speech at a fundraiser for Andrzejewski and from an interview with FoundingBloggers.com. Worth noting:

1. Wałęsa's concern about the weakening of American leadership and what it means for the rest of the world:

The United States is the only superpower. Today they lead the world, nobody has any doubts about it, militarily. They also lead the economically, but they're getting weak. But they don't lead morally and politically any more.

The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort of hope for all other nations. This was the hope, that when ever something was going wrong, we could always count on the United States. Today we've lost that hope.

2. Wałęsa's concern about corruption and waste in government -- bureaucrats increasing governmental power for its own sake, wasting money, at the expense of entrepreneurs. He also expressed concern that the bank bailout showed a "little bit" of America moving toward socialism.

3. Andrzejewski's plan to use an executive order to put government spending online in real-time "from the appropriation to the subcontractor level, where the systemic corruption exists." Without knowing the specifics of Illinois' situation, this suggests a scheme where contracts would be awarded to companies with no apparent political connections, but those prime contractors would then award all the work and most of the contract value to politically connected subcontractors, where it would be harder to trace.

Andrzejewski's plan to issue an executive order for a forensic audit of Illinois state government's $55 billion budget. He calls it "a deep audit, an evidentiary audit. It actually follows the money. If you think about it, it's how we caught Al Capone." He estimates it would save taxpayers $3 to $5 billion.

He mentions that Kathleen Sebelius, as Governor of Kansas, ordered such an audit. Here's the mention on his website:

Good government relies on forensic auditing. The governor of Kansas- kept her promise to "perform a top-to-bottom audit of state government--an effort that to date has uncovered $159 million in wasteful government spending, and led to new efficiencies that produced over $1 billion in budget savings on behalf of Kansas taxpayers."

Adam Andrzejewski has an inspiring background. He and his brother saw a need -- phone books focused on small communities, so that local merchants could reach local customers -- a proceeded to build a successful nationwide business. Read more about Adam Andrzejewski at RedState. And here's a 2006 article from Success magazine about the Andrzejewski brothers. (The article is about balancing the long hours required to start a business with time for family -- worth reading even if you're not interested in the political angle.)

The election is Tuesday, and the latest Republican primary polls have Andrzejewski surging within 2 points of the leader, State Sen. Kirk Dillard, a political insider who endorsed Barack Obama for president. It's a crowded field of six candidates, and there is no runoff. Someone may very well win the primary with 20% of the vote.

Today is the March for Life, the annual event to protest Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that overturned abortion laws nationwide and that has resulted in the death of nearly 50 million innocent American children since that date. You may not be able to get to Washington today to join the march, but you can show your support by registering as a virtual marcher. So far over 65,000 Americans are participating virtually, including leaders like RNC Chairman Michael Steele, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, Andrew Breitbart of BigGovernment.com, and Americans United for Life CEO Charmaine Yoest.

Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary on the "true cost of global warming hysteria," will be screened tonight, January 21, 2010, at Oral Roberts University at 7 pm in Room 236 of the Learning Resource Center. The screening is free and open to the public, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity.

From the film's website:

Global warming alarmists want Americans to believe that humans are killing the planet. But Not Evil Just Wrong, a new documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, proves that the only threats to America (and the rest of the world) are the flawed science and sky-is-falling rhetoric of Al Gore and his allies in environmental extremism.

The film drives home the realities of that extremism. "Turn off your lights. Turn off your heat when you get cold. Turn off your air when you get hot," one man on the street says. "And then think about that."

Not Evil Just Wrong warns Americans that their jobs, modest lifestyles and dreams for their children are at stake. Industries that rely on fossil fuels will be crippled if the government imposes job-killing regulations on an economy already mired in recession. Small towns in the heartland, like Vevay, Ind., will become bastions of unemployment and poverty. Breadwinners like Tim McElhany in Vevay will lose their jobs -- and will have to start borrowing money again just to buy bread for their families.

The damage that would be wrought is unjustified by the science. Not Evil Just Wrong exposes the deceptions that experts, politicians, educators and the media have been force-feeding the public for years. Man-made pollution is not melting the polar icecaps. The ocean will not rise 20 feet in a flash. And the only polar bears dying because of man are the ones who try to eat men.

McAleer and McElhinney debunk what for a time was the environmental movement's most powerful weapon of disinformation, the infamous "hockey stick" graph that attributed a supposedly unique burst of warming in the 20th century to humans. They also shatter the myth that the hottest years in the United States were 1998 and 2006. The hottest year was 1934, and the hottest decade was the 1930s -- when there were half as many people and no SUVs or jumbo jets.

A busy evening -- was with over 200 Tulsans at the PLANiTULSA public forum, then had to come home to entertain the four-year-old so he wouldn't distract big sister, who had a writing assignment to finish for tomorrow. Thankfully the four-year-old was content to sit on my lap as we watched Scott Brown's victory speech. Later, after the kids were finally in bed, I cracked open a victory bottle of Sam Adams Honey Porter, an appropriate way to celebrate a revolutionary victory.

This town-by-town map of Massachusetts election results is interesting. I was not surprised to see Democratic nominee Martha Coakley get 75% in my college hometown of Nuclear-Free Brookline or 85% in the People's Republic of Cambridge. I was surprised that Coakley won, and by big margins, in rural western Mass., which once upon a time sent Republicans to the U. S. House. I was pleased to see Brown won the town of Barnstable, which includes the village of Hyannisport, site of the Kennedy Compound. And while Coakley won Martha's Vineyard, her percentages varied inversely to proximity to Chappaquiddick; Edgartown gave her only 55%.

I tweeted the first part of the PLANiTULSA meeting, hope to write more about it tomorrow evening. In the meantime, you can visit PLANiTULSA.org to read the final version of the policy plan and see draft land use and transportation plan maps. There's even a KMZ version of the land use and "areas of stability" maps, so you can view them in Google Earth.

If you hadn't heard, there's a special election in Massachusetts tomorrow to fill the remainder of the late Ted Kennedy's term in the U. S. Senate. Attorney General Martha Coakley is the Democratic nominee, State Sen. Scott Brown is the Republican nominee. Polls show the race too close to call, an astounding situation given Massachusetts' political profile. But Coakley has run an inept campaign, and Brown has been helped by general discontent, which hurts the party in power, a more likable persona, and financial and volunteer support from conservatives nationwide who see Brown as the best hope for breaking the Democrats' 60-vote stranglehold on the U. S. Senate.

Sissy Willis, a Chelsea, Mass.-based blogger deserves much of the credit for bringing the Mass. special election and Scott Brown's campaign to the attention of conservatives across the country.

Robert Stacy McCain is in Massachusetts covering the final days of the campaign to replace Kennedy for the American Spectator and his own blog.

To conserve his shoe leather reporting fund, McCain is crashing on the couch of blogger DaTechguy, who is writing about the Brown-Coakley race from a local perspective.

RealClearPolitics has a daily round-up of news, poll results, and commentary. And the site's HorseRaceBlog, by political number-cruncher Jay Cost, is always worth reading.

And if you'd like to help turn out the vote for Scott Brown, he still needs volunteers and contributions.

UPDATE:

Pollster Chris Wilson is in Massachusetts and wonders about the effect of ice and snow on tomorrow's vote.

Fleming and Hayes is another Mass. based blog covering the special election. They have an exclusive interview with an American citizen, originally from Iran, who was excluded from a rally featuring Bill Clinton and detained by Secret Service because, the man says, he is on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. He is a volunteer for the Coakley campaign from Springfield in western Mass.