novatownhall blog

A question of tactics: Many are now saying, I will surely need to hold my nose to vote this November. Hold nose, vote for John McCain.

I am not sure, however, that it will be that simple.

A friend noted the other night: “I am saving a bottle of champagne for the election, which I will drink BEFORE voting, so that I will be able to vote for John McCain.”

Here’s how I plan to play it. Work late on the Monday before election day, to win some time the next day. Begin drinking around 8:00 pm on Monday. Spend Monday night watching at least 14 hours of the latest DVD set of the series “24″ while carefully imbibing up to three bottles of cabernet sauvignon. At around 9:00 am Tuesday morning, walk to the precinct voting location – which is about a mile away – and then vote. Vote for whom? Well, we’ll see, We’ll just see. Maybe it will be John McCain. Maybe. Maybe it will be a write in. This is where the conscience will kick in, as the conscience always does at 10:00 am after a long night of drinking.

I think this is the best chance the Straight Talk Express has to get my vote in November.

The lone big-time national blog we deign to include in the NVTH blogroll has just won Blogger of the Year award at CPAC.

Read about it here, at his own blog where the praise is so effusive it’s positively Athenian.

The blogger Ace of Spades (or, as he affectionately known by the Washington Times’ Inside Politics column, Ace of Spaces) is – despite his legendary Tarantino-esque lifestyle – a genuinely nice, soft-spoken and intelligent guy.

In an undeniable display of cohones, he took the plunge a couple years ago and gave up his day job to become a professional, full-time blogger, which is very, very hard to make work numbers-wise. Now, I don’t know whether he’s drinking single-malt or rail brands these days, but the quality of his commentary and the blog as a whole are in the highest echelon of the blogosphere. It’s a thrice-daily stop for me.

Congratulations, Ace, it could not have gone to a more deserving guy.

UPDATE: My man.

The compost reports that a majority of both Houses of Congress have joined in sending an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging it to uphold the lower court decision overturning D.C.’s gun ban.  Congress has the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over the District of Columbia.  If they really opposed the gun ban, they would have repealed it already.  I wonder if Tom Davis joined this fiasco.

Now that we know John McCain is the Republican nominee for president, and therefore the Virginia primary on February 12 is completely meaningless for anyone who was planning to vote Republican, I encourage all Virginia voters with good sense to join me in a little experiment.

Let’s write in “Lou Dobbs” for president.

The timing is perfect; with Romney leaving the race today we have just enough time to conduct a mini-publicity campaign.

This will serve three purposes:

1) Give us a reason to go to the polls on Tuesday, and thereby be able to say we were part of the democratic process.

2) Determine how many people we can reach to engage in this exercise and what the level of interest turns out to be.

3) Send a message to Lou Dobbs that there is a need for a candidate who shares our beliefs about illegal immigration.

“Lou Dobbs” is unarguably easy to spell, so there is zero need to split hairs explaining “HOW” to do the write-in part. All we need to do is spread the word far and wide to “write-in Lou Dobbs for President.”

Unless you are inclined to monkey with the Democratic Party process, which seems about as interesting as perusing the toy aisles at Wal-Mart, there is absolutely no reason not to go to the polls on Tuesday and write-in Lou Dobbs. We’re basically paying for this election to take place so we might as well try to get some use out of it.

Please help spread the word.

Now that we’ve got the whole Romney episode behind us, the landscape comes more clearly into view.

The key question has to be: How long before Lou Dobbs will decide whether to mount a third-party run for the presidency?

He has been very coy so far, but the way things have worked out could not possibly have been more evocative of the scenario Dobbs would pose as most compelling: Regardless of how it plays out between now and the two Conventions, we are going to have a presidential campaign this fall in which both major party candidates are rock-solid open borders advocates.

Both Senators Clinton and Obama voted for the 2007 “comprehensive” immigration reform bill which would have immediately legalized tens of millions of illegal aliens and pushed millions of those waiting in line for legal immigration to the back of the line.

Senator McCain wrote the bill.

McCain now says he has gotten the message and will secure the border first, and anybody who believes that should go down to the border and enjoy an afternoon under the shade of the 800-mile border fence that was signed into law in 2006.

So no matter what, if one of the major party candidates wins we will have four years … er, four more years … of a pro-illegal administration in the White House.

I think there are a few little non-official Web sites calling for Lou Dobbs to run – here is one. The organization ALIPAC is leading the effort to draft Dobbs.

As far as I have heard Dobbs has refused to out and out discount the possibility of a presidential run, but has continued to deny he has such a thing in mind.

The most compelling evidence I have seen that he DOES have that very thing in mind is that much of his recent rhetoric makes no sense if he is not planning to run for president. His new book, Independents Day, consists of a litany of problems for which the only solution will be the emergence of unnamed “independent” political leaders who presumably happen to espouse the exact policies and world view as would Lou Dobbs – however these policies are nowhere spelled out. I found the book interesting, because it does bring together in one narrative a number of major problems our country is facing – but frankly, it leaves one with a “so what” reaction because listing problems doesn’t really contribute much to solving them.

His recent messages on the nightly show follow this same pattern. A couple weeks ago he did a special program supposedly exploring the current presidential candidates to determine which ones are addressing the critical issues of the day, and all we got was a succession of discussion panels affirming that our nation has a host of problems. (It looks like there will be either a tape of that program or another installment of it on tonight at 8:00 pm EST, by the way).

On the other hand, if the author of the book does have answers to the problems enumerated within, and suddenly bursts upon the political scene espousing these answers, then the book becomes a valuable tool in the debate.

In addition, it contains some typos and redundancies which definitely indicate a rushed editing job – as though the book had to be available by the beginning of the year, because, well, possibly to coincide with some type of public event that kicked off that month. Like possibly the 2008 presidential campaign.

So here we have it, a perfect storm if there ever was one. I guarantee Lou Dobbs is giving this matter some serious thought, and that by the time it sinks in with the general public that we are on the road to an avowed open borders presidency, there will be a whole lot more people asking Lou what he plans to do.

Looks like I’ll be voting in the Democratic Primary.  The compost says Romney is dropping out.

A comment by co-blogger ACTivist just reminded me this would be a good time to re-link to the landmark essay by Fredo Arias-King which explains the ideological basis for our government’s laissez-faire approach to illegal immigration, and which we should all read every couple months lest we forget what is happening here:

…while acknowledging that they may not now receive their votes, they believed that these immigrants are more malleable than the existing American: That with enough care, convincing, and “teaching,” they could be converted, be grateful, and become dependent on them. Republicans seemed to idealize the patron-client relation with Hispanics as much as their Democratic competitors did.

Now more than ever – with immigration enforcement being debated in the Virginia General Assembly and a central topic in the presidential election campaign – it is critical that the citizens have their eyes wide open as to why our elected officials act in such confounding ways with regard to this issue.

And before anyone objects that I’m overlooking the economic basis for the influx of illegal workers, let me assure you I understand the role that international trade policies such as NAFTA have played in this along with the political and economic corruption of Mexico and corruption in the business community here in the U.S. My contention is these types of economic factors will never be addressed as long as our elected officials see the importation of a new electorate as a good thing. Illegal immigration pays, in the form of well-financed lobbying factions, it provides ideological safe harbor for public figures looking to burnish their political correctness credentials, and it portends a bright future in terms of job security for the elected and bureaucratic classes – so what’s not to like? Take away the latter rationale and the other two could be more readily attacked and exposed, but the basic tendency toward self-preservation through usurpation among certain powerful public officials ensures the trend will continue. This is what we are up against.