I’m going to file Sen. John McCain - War Hero, valourous and decorated former POW, so-called “maverick” GOP politician who has often bucked the will of the party and especially its conservative base, and now perfidious perpetrator of such practices as the last minute robo-calls in Florida and a decided distaste - bordering on hatred - of the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights. And perhaps even the normal, everyday citizens of these United States too - to whom he has ridden a broken and twisted rail with on his “Straight Talk Express”.

Senator McCain, I am calling you out as an enemy of the Constitution of the United States, and insist that you step down from your candidacy for the GOP nomination and disband your campaign for the Presidency.

You have stabbed your fellow party members in the back repeatedly by crossing party lines to support the free-speech limiting McCain-Feingold legislation, you’ve called for an unlimited and unrestricted path to citizenship for *millions* of unlawful migrants, many of whom are gangsters, criminals, drug traffickers, and subversive Mexican partisans who wish to overthrow both federal and regional governments to shatter the Republic and form some new “Aztlan” nation, and you’ve incurred the ire of American gun owners with your continued assaults on the Second Amendment.

How can we ever trust you not to continue to do as you wish, and not as the American People wish?

How can we ever trust you again in the halls of government, when you continually oppose what is right, when you clamp down on free speech, grab peoples’ guns, oscillate in your support of the federally-mandated right to murder innocent pre-partum babies, and wish to open up our border to any person - be they honest hard-working hopeful citizen who might contribute to our American society, or a vile, treacherous criminal or terrorist - to come into our nation and take us for a prey?

Or would you steer the helm of this Republic with your admitted ignorance of how to guide the economy back to a position of growth, a thing of envy in the world and not ridicule? Indeed, you are so quick to beat the drums of war ever harder and call for the bombing of other nations when our budget is already stretched to its breaking point.

Or would you call your support to work with the George Soros acolytes who would hamstring our economy with all sorts of restrictions and regulations about “carbon emissions” for a yet debated and undetermined cause for the supposed phenomenon of global warming - while continuing to block our ability to harvest our own resources (ANWR, offshore oil) only to let Red China and other enemies of our nation drain them away from a distance?

Please… for the love of this nation, whatever part of you that remains a patriot - I call upon you to cease from ruining this Republic with your socialist ideas, your subversive support of the Democrat’s platform, and withdraw from the presidential election.

I’d sooner see a real Republican and conservative in the office before you, and I may very well face the choice of having to choose between you, Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton - and choosing not to pull the lever at all.

Please, do not make me face that nightmare.

It may appear that either my user account at RedState has been blocked (hopefully by some sort of machine glitch which will be corrected in short order)…

… or I have somehow managed to annoy one of the moderators enough that he or she lowered the banhammer on me.

Generally, the mods warn people once, maybe twice, and then “Blam” them (which means their account gets banned). And it’s usually pretty quick, as there is a large handful of mods, and it is not obvious to newer users who they are - as newer users might be inclined to further sass the mods after they’ve told the offending party to straighten up.

I’ve checked the last dozen or so posts I remember making over the past few days, and see no such warning from anyone with the “moderator tone of voice”.

Now I’ll grouse here a little, because if indeed I’ve been banned, I can’t see how. I realize that sites like RedState (hereinafter RS) and DailyKos tend to get some folks with moderator power who might treat things like the site is their private fiefdom … where in fact, it is to a certain extent. I know well about this, as I used to moderate a forum years ago and had to ban the occasional user who got out of hand.

So, I acknowledge this and try to play by the RS house rules of as best as I can, although I can see some instances where the banhammer gets dropped really fast…

A while back, a whole slew of people got banned (new accounts that had been created with six months of that ban were bulk-deleted) for trolling for Ron Paul.

Now, while I’ll admit that some RP supporters are either young or without a proper working knowledge of basic netiquette - thus resulting in the overcorrection done by RS.

The reaction does rub me a little wrong - but RS is privately owned, and people are allowed to participate there at the owners’ pleasure: i.e. you have no expectation of freedom of speech, because you are on private property. And some folks there are pretty blunt in telling you that if you don’t like that, then tough - go somewhere else.

Setting aside any possible partisan arguments for why someone may have lowered the boom on my account, let’s see if I broke the rules…

The RS rules are simple and few:

# No profanity.
# No personal attacks.
# No harassment or demonization of a particular individual.
# No disruptive behavior or off-topic remarks for their own sake.

There are a few other rules particular to the blogging engine (such as not self-recommending posts) and not spamming something across multiple blogs.

I may have self-recommended a post early on before I knew what that feature really was about, and having later seen that rule, have never attempted to do so since.

Now coming back to why I *think* I may have been banned (although I have not been yet informed that I have been banned yet from any RS authority)…

… I had been an ardent supporter of Fred Thompson during his run, and had advocated for him in a friendly way on RS.

Fred dropped out, as did several other conservative candidates I might have considered supporting sans Fred.

Coming up to the recent FL primary, the RS user community seems to have split into Romney and McCain camps, with the Management seeming to align moreso with the McCain camp.

Farbeit for me to presume that any particular mods were acting from bias, so I will try to review the general gist of my position on Romney vs. McCain on RS thus far:

I stated that I *will not* support McCain, neither in the primary nor in the general — even to the point of crossing party lines for the POTUS choice.

I stated that McCain will generally be expected to act in opposition to the conservative base of the GOP, whereas Romney - while liberal for my taste - is supportable because he wants to get re-elected in 2012, and will be more beholden to that base.

Never did I question his patriotism, nor his valour while in captivity — those facts are a matter of record that McCain conducted himself with utmost care as a prisoner of war.

But I do question his willingness to do things his own way, I question McCain-Feinberg, I question McCain-Kennedy (amnesty) I question McCain-Lieberman, and I question his choice to side with the Gang of 14.

I question his tendency towards statism, and his acerbic wit, and temperament to govern, much less compete in a race against a calculating liberal, and a silver-tongued orator both of whom will know how to press his buttons in a Presidential debate.

I do not dislike the man personally, but I abhor his politics, and believe with ever fibre of my being that he is the worst possible choice for POTUS…

…and should any mods from RS happen to read this, and decide to ban me for my opinions - then I very well have no control or further input into it. If that is the case that I can’t play in your bailiwick because we disagree - then I guess I really can’t be bitter about it.

But I am disappointed.

Although I haven’t concluded my period of mourning for Fred, I’ve more or less come to my conclusions:

1) As tempting as it might be to vote for Fred *should* his name appear on my NY ballot when I go vote Tuesday after next… it would be a wasted vote, especially as Fred was only polling at 10% at the most recent Rasmussen Report - and with FredHeads splitting out more or less evenly over the remaining candidates, I’d do better to give my best man a boost if it helps

2) Despite the MSM McCain-amania (or as I prefer to call it, their love of Ol’ Grumpy Grandpa the Backstabber) - he is still a left-leaning Rockefeller RINO who has regularly eaten at the table of Feingold and Ted Kennedy. Tsunami Tuesday may not be as nice to him as he thinks it will. This RINO is also self-admittedly clueless about the environment.

3) Huckabee is unsupportable (even with the somewhat unexpected, yet understandable, Duncan Hunter endorsement) in my estimation for his heavy reliance on the Clinton playbook, lack of foreign policy knowledge, and general desire for nanny-statism, even if it comes with a (pseudo)-Christian flavouring.

4) Ron Paul has some good conservative bonafides, but a lot of negatives as well, with his anti-Israel and his pre-1930s (dare I say, pre-1910s) goldbuggery and military isolationism, not too mention his advanced age - like McCain, he might sit the first term, but would not be likely to inspire many to vote him in a second term. On the plus side, his unshakeable defense of following the Constitution as our guide and our law is unparalleled among the remaining candidates.

5) Rudy - I have absolutely no respect left for this shyster who has had a family life that makes the (Ozzy) Osbournes look like Ozzie and Harriet, and whose extreme social liberalness once threatened to send the evangelical voters to third parties or over to the Donks.

That ultimately leaves me reluctantly with Mitt as the recipient of my former Fred vote. I know I’ve been rather critical of Mitt both here and on RedState and other conservative forums, but I’ll reluctantly vote for Mitt in NY’s Tsunami Tuesday for the following reasons:

1) He is (now) eminently electable. Unlike the other candidates and especially unlike MSM-pimped frontrunner McCain, he *knows* the economy, and how to grow business and trade. While he did not sign onto the APT promise not to raise new taxes, I believe that he will exhaust as many options as possible before raising taxes - to include the first line measures of reducing spending standing up to a pork-loving DemCong.

2) He may not be all that I want as a defense conservative, but as a leader and a manager, he will select men and generals and give them leeway to prosecute the war to an end with results - after all, he would be CinC, but foremost, a civilian leader - not an armchair general. In this, I hope I am not wrong - and perhaps he might really do me a personal favor and appoint Fred Thompson or John Bolton as Secretary of State to do the tough talking to Achmahdinejad and his cronies.

3) Solid social values - I disagree with his particular faith as the path for redemption and salvation, but the LDS church does subscribe to many of the outward works and social values that Christians also strive for in Christ. The works do not save in and of themselves, but when folks follow godly principles and conduct, they benefit as a nation.

Now while I have said much about Mitt’s abortion and LGBT flip-flops… I will eat crow here and say that I hope that he sticks by whatever “epiphany” he has had regarding his newly found support of life and the like, and that at the very least that he will appoint a solid conservative judge to replace Ginsberg or one of the other aging liberals.

Mitt has been a very distant second to my row of choices behind Fred… since Hunter, Brownback and Tancredo dropped out before Fred.

But it is time to face facts, folks. Barring the Second Coming or some other similar miracle as posited by Steve Stark over at RCP… Fred has one back to bed, and we have to pick the guy who can stop RINO McCain and the HuckRINO.

So I get back from Japan this morning, only to find the Fred08 site having finally posted something after a couple-three days of inactivity:

Fred D. Thompson has withdrawn his candidacy for the GOP nomination.

So away go the Fred widgets, as I mull over how exactly lukewarm my “support” will be for Mitt (my “number two” guy).

And folks, it gets even more ugly after the jump… (more…)

Time to face reality, I guess…

with Fred coming in at a very weak third place in the SC primary tonight, this does not bode well for the Thompson campaign in the Ol’ Deep South.
(more…)

slug to be worked on later, posting this so I can find it easily.

http://www.city.kobe.jp/cityoffice/54/020/routemap.gif

I’m about ready to gurgle with glee over here… in less than 48 hours, I’ll be arriving in Ōsaka and riding back to Kōbe to see my beloved other half, and our little boy.

And then there’s Tanaka-sensei’s sushi, and the possibility of an all-I-can-eat Kōbe beef/Wagyū yakiniku… and Kirin lager (not the import stuff, which is better than the dishwater we call beer over here … Anheuser-Busch, Miller, that means YOU!) and of course, plenty of plum wine and yuzu.

Ah, yes. Fun times await… and enjoy them I shall, before oil spikes again and drives airfares through the stratosphere.

Of course, that means a reduction in my blogging activity, of which I’m sure that my two or three intermittent readers who chance upon this blog per month probably won’t miss.

Some of Mitt Romney’s supporters in New Hampshire are up to no good, as caught on camera swiping peoples’ lawn signs and switching McCain signs for Romney signs.

An act of immense stupidity (i.e. taping it or getting caught on tape) and skullduggery.

Is this how you really try to get people to like your man?

For those who might want to swipe my Fred Thompson signage, be warned that you might not want to test my willingness to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights to protect my property.

Thank you kindly, and I hope you’ll play nice for the camera next time, just like your man Romney tries to.

I was blisteringly angry following the latest NH debate…

…the review of the talking heads and other pundits, when Frank Luntz’s “Faux-cus Group”, erm.. excuse me, focus group present Romney as the untouchable scion to the mantle of Ronaldus Magnus.

And the “show of hands” by a panel of “undecided voters” (and therefore presumably unbiased, as well) .

Let’s see how unbiased they actually are:

No bias going on there, ya think? Who is paying this guy to shill with such great theatrics - Mitt’s campaign, or Fox News Channel?

Watch and see this video which has been making the rounds on RedState, TownHall, and other conservative web forums:

The telling thing here, is the apparent inclusion of the SAME guy from the first NH debates a few months ago as last night. Some of the Ron Paul supporters (arguably incensed that their guy was summarily excluded by Fox News Channel) have also indicated that some or all of the focus group members were in fact, paid actors.

Whether that is so remains to be determined… but I do smell something stinky coming from the “Live Free or Die” state, and it sure as heck ain’t my kid’s diapers.

Not to knock on Romney too hard… he didn’t crack as badly under the multiple attacks he faced from the other candidates as he did in the previous debate; but he wasn’t absolutely stellar either.

It’s not the first time Luntz comes off as a shill for Romney either:

In last night’s debate, I see no clear winner who stood head and shoulders above the rest; all did reasonably well, with the possible exception of McCain’s occasional barb, and Huckabee getting flustered at turns.

But the pandering and Luntz not even making the pretence of impartiality as he pointed to the “pander-o-meter” cresting at each golden word falling from Mitt’s carefully glossed lips seemed hokey at best, and staged at worst.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that Luntz is a propagandist shill who is paid to deliver… the numbers:

*warning: very foul language

… so let’s hop on board with another healthy round of donations, and recruitments of new Friends of Fred!