Open Thread: Rich ‘Starbursts’ Lowry Has A New Crush

The guy who wrote this for the NRO, back in 2008….

Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

… has a new heartthrob to burble about today, for Politico:

The lazy conventional wisdom is that Ted Cruz is the new Barry Goldwater doomed to suffer an electoral landslide defeat should he win the Republican nomination.

Not only is this wrong about Cruz’s general-election chances, it may compare Cruz to the wrong 20th-century Republican forebear. The better analogue for Cruz might be Richard Nixon, not in the crudely pejorative sense, but as another surpassingly shrewd and ambitious politician who lacked a personal touch but found a way to win nonetheless…

… He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else.

Certainly, Cruz is not ascending on the basis of warm feelings from his colleagues. Cruz portrays his unpopularity within the Senate as establishment distaste for him as a lonely man of principle. But it is a genuine personal dislike. Not that Cruz cares. In fact, a key to what he has been able to achieve is his apparent immunity to the reflexive desire to be liked by people around you, a weakness to which almost all of us fall prey. Cruz is free of the peer pressure that typically makes all senators, at some level, team players.

Cruz is a Reagan Republican, although with considerable flexibility within those parameters. When Rand Paul seemed to be on the ascendancy a couple of years ago, Cruz was a Reagan Republican with Paulite accents. When Donald Trump began to dominate, Cruz became a Reagan Republican with Trumpian tendencies. If Jim Gilmore were to catch fire, Cruz would presumably find a way to incorporate a Gilmoresque element into his platform…

At the moment, if Trump loses the nomination, Cruz is most likely to be the instrument of his defeat by flattering and co-opting him and his supporters.

This speaks to deft political sense that runs counter to his caricature as a mindless hard-liner. Indeed, Cruz is an amazingly supple adamantine politician. He benefits from the old Mark Twain adage that once you get a reputation as an early riser, you can sleep ’til noon every day. Cruz’s unbending image makes it possible for him to bend as it suits him…

Marco Rubio and Chris Christie are both, in their own ways, more winsome and it’s easier to see how each of them could pick off Obama states. But Cruz has always understood that you have to win the primary to win the general. He has set about to do it in truly impressive fashion. Whoever is going to beat him, better know what he’s doing—because Cruz certainly does.

Hands outa yer pants, Lowry, this ain’t one of your low RWNJ dives.

Open Thread: ‘Militia’, Go Home

Seriously:

As reported by the Washington Post:

“The protesters have no claim to this land. It belongs to the native people who continue to live here,” Burns Paiute tribal chair Charlotte Rodrique said at a press conference Wednesday.

The occupation of the refuge, now in its fourth day, has been part demand for local control over public land and part protest over how the federal government manages the Western landscape. Bundy, an Idaho rancher and the son of Cliven Bundy, and his followers stake claim on vast stretches of federal land in the West and have vowed to occupy the refuge until a complete investigation into historical land deeds and ownership rights yields a transfer of land control to local interests. Bundy supporter and refuge occupier LaVoy Finicum, who lives near Bundy’s father in Arizona, said that a paper trail would reveal an illegal transfer of sale from private ownership to the government and that an investigation into historical Western real estate sales would unwind federal control of the lands.

But Sara J. Hawley, a member of the local Paiute tribe, said the land has never belonged to anybody but the Paiute.

“The Burns Paiute Tribe has not ceded any of its rights in the tribe’s ancestral territory,” added Rodrique, pointing to a treaty — never ratified in Washington — that means many Westerners are technically squatting on Paiute land.

“They wanted us to give up our land,” Rodrique said. “We never did it.”

In 1868, the Burns Paiute Tribe entered into a treaty with the federal government that among other things, guaranteed the protection and safety of the Paiute people and their cultural resources. Six tribe band leaders signed the treaty but the U.S. Senate never ratified it. Without ratification, the agreement was voided and a legal transfer of land never occurred, Rodrique said.

“We never gave up our aboriginal rights,” she said. “We did have a treaty but it wasn’t ratified, so therefore it was a contract that was never completed. And so we as a tribe view that this is still our land.”…

“They say they don’t want to bother the community, but you know what? Our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be at school. They’re jeopardizing, they’re scaring our people around here,” [Burns Paiute tribal councilman Jarvis] Kennedy said…

The NYTimes says the non-Paiute locals mostly aren’t much enamored of Bundy and his VanillaISIS cult, either:

BURNS, Ore. — Hundreds of residents crammed into a building at the Harney County Fairgrounds here on Wednesday night, far surpassing the capacity of the rows of brown metal folding chairs set up on a concrete floor, to talk in often deeply emotional terms about their community — and just who should be in charge of its destiny…

“You don’t get to come here and tell us how we get to live our lives,” said Sheriff Dave Ward of Harney County, who led the meeting, and the crowd erupted into applause and cheers. “I’m here to ask those folks to go home and let us go back to our lives in Harney County,” he added, again to huge applause…

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Late Night Open Thread: The NRA Will Have None of this ‘Democracy’ Nonsense…

Adam was discussing commentor Siubhan Duinne‘s hopeful proposal to this effect just last night — and he was right, alas. From the CNN article:

The nation’s largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence — just days after the president reignited a discussion over this controversial topic.

“The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN, which is moderating the live town hall Thursday evening in Virginia. The NRA strengthened its comment after initially saying the White House had “organized” the event.

The NRA, the most influential gun rights group in terms of political persuasion and financial contributions, boasts a membership of about five million people….

… which the NRA consistently elides as ‘most Americans’, because who cares about the other 299,000,000 of us?

… On the overall issue of gun control, 48% of Americans support stricter laws, while 51% were opposed, according a CNN/ORC poll released last month….

Some of the groups invited to attend the town hall, which will feature direct audience questioning of the president, include Gun Owners of America, American Firearms Retailers Association, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, among others.

IIRC, Gun Owners of America are the people who think the NRA is too wishy-washy about every American’s absolute right to own as many semi-automatics, full automatics, tank-mounted artillery weapons and possibly suitcase nukes as “we” want, so it’s not like CNN was trying to load the dice.

President Obama’s Executive Action on Guns (Updated)

He’s speaking on it right now. You can watch on YouTube here. He sounds sad, angry and determined, which is exactly what we all should be.

Update: “The gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage, but they cannot hold America hostage.” — PBO

Update II: The speech is over. If you couldn’t watch it live, do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing later. It was incredibly touching, honest, unsparing and inspirational. Damn, I’m gonna miss President Obama.

Many of us have wondered what he’ll do after his term is up. I never considered the possibility that he would make gun safety a focus, but maybe he will. You can tell he’s very passionate about it.

Update III: A short clip, but watch the whole thing when you can.

Open Thread: “The Common Clay of the New West…”

“…. you know — morons!”

Adam, bless the man, is doing serious, constructive updates on the Great Malheur Bird Sanctuary Loon Invasion. Which leaves me free to do what I’m best at — aggregating the bathos, cheap shots and snark. Has anyone else made note that “Malheur” is French for “misfortune”?…

Amanda Peacher’s a local reporter:

The prospect of hundreds of out-of-towners who openly carry firearms concerns some residents in Burns.

Fliers with the message “Militia go home” hang on signposts downtown.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said he received death threat emails from people in other states after he told militia organizers he would not create a safe haven for the Hammonds to stay in Harney County.

“I haven’t slept a full night in close to two months now. I have a lot of anxiety,” he said. But Sheriff Ward wants to protect his county.

“What we’ve been threatened with here is civil unrest and the insinuations of armed rebellion,” said Sheriff Ward…

Even Bundy is unsure whether the protest is a good idea, and whether it’s proper for his family’s supporters to get involved. “I don’t quite understand how much they’re going to accomplish,” Bundy said. “I think of it this way: what business does the Bundy family have in Harney County, Oregon?”…

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Ballon Juice Bunker Standoff Update: Day 2

Not much is happening. OregonLive is reporting that the local sheriff has stated that the couple of dozen extremists hold up at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge came to the area to overthrow both the local government and the national one. They’ve also reported that law enforcement is taking a very low key and quiet approach to resolving this. Though a command post will be set up by Monday. And local schools have been cancelled for the week as a precaution.

Jim Foolish Literalist provided us with this link to a local reporter’s twitter feed in comments to John’s earlier post.

Keep all your Internets tuned to Balloon Juice’s coverage of this very, slowly developing story…