I go away for a week and all hell breaks loose…

Back to live blogging again; well sort of. It’s actually Thursday afternoon as I start this for posting later this evening and I know my Shorebird of the Week post comes up tonight. So I don’t give him short shrift, check him out here and then come back to read this!

It was soooooo boring for the last 2-3 weeks before I took my break so I guess they were waiting for me to take a few days off to have all of these events happen just so I had time to digest them and make some sort of reasoned commentary. There were seven events over the last week that I think are worth commenting on and alluding to. I’m going to go more or less in chronological order.

• “Robinson on the Radio” gets cancelled.

I know there were a few who didn’t think I came across well on the radio but geez, I feel like Typhoid Michael now. I’m a guest and ONE WEEK later the show’s axed. I wore the shirt I got one time!

Oddly enough, I missed the actual announcement since he had a guest on that, frankly, I had no interest in listening to. So I turned off the radio that Thursday about 3:10. Once I saw the blurb on the internet I made the effort to listen to his final show last Friday but my parents arrived about 3:15 or so – thus I missed the sign off.

What the situation has begat is a continuation of the flame war between John Robinson and a certain local blogger where the blogger takes great pleasure in the little parody piece that WICO played on Monday at 3:00. Meanwhile, Robinson talks about going into the web news business. Now John, if you were complaining about losing a six-figure amount of business time because of the radio show, what makes you think that doing an internet news site (even for just local events) isn’t going to cost you plenty of time when time is money? Even if you have hired a reporter as you state, there’s still work involved. I do this as a hobby and don’t do a news site, but still spend several hours a week on doing my website. Just a word to the wise as a friend.

Regardless, the local blogging scene has become more contentious than its usual warlike state as a result.

• Andy Harris makes spending and pork an issue.

I got a press release while I was away detailing how the Club For Growth has endorsed Andy Harris over the incumbent Wayne Gilchrest. Apparently, the Gilchrest camp responded in kind (I’ve not received their reply) so Chris Meekins of the Harris campaign fired back a reply this morning, which I excerpt from here:

As I read Congressman Gilchrest’s campaign statement in response to our comments on his fiscal spending record, I felt the need to clarify and reinforce some of the issues the statement addressed.

Over the course of the next weeks and months, our campaign will continue to provide objective information, including the roll call vote number, so that you can see for yourself how Gilchrest voted on ALL of the amendments offered by fiscally responsible Republicans to cut spending growth – the vast majority of which Gilchrest voted AGAINST. We applaud him for voting for two amendments to cut spending, but two out of more than a dozen is not something one should be touting as a clear record of fiscal restraint.

Also, we will discuss how, in the last month alone, Gilchrest voted for over $15 billion dollars in tax increases. And we thought the $1.5 billion in tax increases the Democrats in Maryland are proposing was a lot!

Our campaign was very surprised to see the incumbent actually vigorously defend earmarks (otherwise known as “pork”). For those who may not be aware the Office of Management and Budget defines an “earmark” as: “funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to properly manage funds.”

Members of Congress insert earmarks into much larger spending bills hoping they will be overlooked or lost in the thousands of pages. Earmarks don’t consider which company can do the best job and they take competition on price and quality completely out of the government procurement process. Basic free-market economics teach you that non-competitive contracts by the government will always increase the cost to you the taxpayer and may frequently lower the quality of the work done.

According to the Office of Management and Budget’s website, the Fiscal Year 2008 appropriation bills in the House contain over 3814 earmarks totaling $2.4 billion.

(snip)

Think about this situation. The owner of a company raises funds for a congressman’s reelection and a congressman in turn, repays him by putting an earmark for that company for millions of dollars for a noncompetitive contract into a bill. By Congress continuing to vote for earmarks, the opportunity is present for corruption to occur. But that’s the way business is done in Washington these days, it appears.

Andy Harris will continue to oppose earmarks. Andy beleives the people of the first congressional district do not want their tax dollars to reward companies who generously donate to the Democratic Party. Andy believes cleaning up the earmark process is the first step in eliminating corruption in Congress. Harris opposes out of control wasteful government spending – which is why as a state senator, he voted against six of the last nine state budgets.

Wayne Gilchrest spoke out strongly against the Washington establishment when he was first elected to office in 1990 – now he has become a part of it. We sent Wayne to change Washington – but Washington has instead, over the years, changed Wayne.

I’ll be brutally honest here. On an editorial level, it should be known that I support Andy Harris. In the interest of voter education though, I have and will place items on monoblogue from any of the five announced candidates – whether they be GOP or Democrat – because I believe that a voter should be as well-informed as possible.

The one fear I have in this race is that the conservative supporters will split and leave Gilchrest as the winner with a plurality of the vote (think Bill Clinton in 1992.) Having said that, though, later this fall I will prove that even though Gilchrest is much farther left than I like he’ll still be preferable to a Democrat in the seat.

• Ames Straw Poll results in first GOP casualty.

And I correctly predicted who it would be. It was pretty much speculated (even by his opponents) that Mitt Romney would win the Straw Poll, so the real race was for second. That position was held by one of my top choices, Mike Huckabee. Unfortunately, my endorsed candidate, Rep. Duncan Hunter, finished near the bottom in Ames. Over the weekend, I want to delve back into this race because it’s sort of sad that no candidate is really a “perfect” candidate for me – someplace I had to make some compromises.

But maybe Hunter will do better in the upcoming Wicomico County Straw Poll on September 24. Since we notified our WCRC members about it first, I’ll spread the word here as well.

• The Maryland GOP is broke.

At least it is if you believe the Baltimore Sun article from Saturday. That tends to happen when a party has little to no power base in a state. If this were in a deep red state like Idaho, I’m sure we’d find the Idaho Democrat party runs on a shoestring budget as well.

But a lot of the article talks about the infighting between moderates and conservatives in the party, particularly in Anne Arundel County. (Brian Griffiths and redstate.org is on that like a blanket.)

I ran for my post because of two things I believe in: one, that the Republican Party if it follows principle is the most effective tool for bringing about change in our government to lessen its power over the common citizen; and secondly, that the voters should have the final say in who best represents the Republican Party at the general election ballot box. While I may not agree with their primary choice, the voters are the ones who should make that decision, not a state party annointing a candidate and trying to throw out all would-be challengers. (Refer to Ohio Republican Party 1998 and 2006 for examples.)

So at the moment we have infighting because there is a group who believes the incumbent should be supported at all costs vs. a group I align with that thinks the people should decide whether the incumbents are worthy of another term. Obviously when it comes to the First Congressional District I don’t. But I’m certain we will come together in time for 2008 because we have bigger challenges to face, most likely she’s named Hillary Clinton and he’s named Frank Kratovil, and both are backed in Maryland by the tax-raiser Martin O’Malley.

• Karl Rove leaves his post.

Well, now who’s the liberals going to blame when they don’t get their way? The guy is a Deputy Chief of Staff, yet they get all worked up about him. I hope Karl enjoys his family and his retirement, although having his first post-announcement interview on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show was a nice little thumb in the MSM’s eye as well.

By the way, would Rove not be a kick-ass Lincoln Day speaker next year? Hell, put him at the Red, White, and Blue Dinner and the Maryland GOP will be out of debt in no time!

• monoblogue server issues.

Yes, I was frustrated too. As far as my server company goes, there’s never a good time to have outages but within the last three months of your server term is REALLY bad timing. I can eat a few bucks if I can be assured I’ll have more reliable service that’s not out anywhere from 2 to 14 hours at a stretch and a local person to bitch at when it does. How I moved up in the BNN Influence Rankings from #9 to #8 with the artificially lower readership is beyond me.

• West Salisbury Little League.

I’m going to end on a positive note. Right now our fair city, for all its faults that are detailed on several other websites that I do and don’t link to, has within it one of the 16 best Little League teams in the world. Even if they don’t get to the finals these kids have nothing to hang their heads about, but I’m hoping in a week or so we’ll be glued to our TV’s watching them take on a team from some distant shore for the LLWS title.

And for the really positive note – I missed sitting here and writing monoblogue on a daily basis but the time off was worth it when I get to spend time with people like this. Yes, that’s my kid. The picture’s too big to use here so I just linked to it.